Originally Posted by
WhyFi
I used to really love vintage planes, and I still have a half-dozen or more nice Millers Falls, but good, new planes are so much easier to deal with out of the box. Yeah, you can fettle those ol' planes so that they'll perform splendidly, but it takes a lot of time to find a good candidate (at a reasonable price) and a lot of elbow grease and sandpaper. At this point, I'd rather save some pennies and buy a Veritas or Lie-Nielsen. Same with chisels.
I have a couple of nice old Stanley #6, 7 and one not very well setup #8. I use them exclusively for book matched joinery, so anything smaller is not much of regular use, since I already have an 8” standalone planer/jointer and a 13” ridgid planer. Of course that doesn’t stop me from lusting after Lie-Nielsens.
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I’m almost embarrassed to say this, and they do chip if you look at them the wrong way, but I’ve found that Harbor Freight’s $5.99 set of chisels does an ok job if one’s ok with giving them a couple of swipes on the plates every 2-3 cuts. But again, I use them even less than I use the hand planes, so I’m ok with constant re-sharpening.
Bah, the day job hasn’t been leaving any meaningful time to do any guitar building, light wood working any way.
