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Bought a cheap hand plane off eBay for $18 and spent 4 weekends trying to flatten the sole
Turns out it was a warped piece of pot metal from the 60s and I could've got a used Stanley for the same money, anyone else get burned by vintage tool listings?
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lee84712d ago
Three weekends just to figure out it was junk... I've been there. That bubbly texture you mentioned is a dead giveaway for a bad casting, not just some random pot metal. I actually disagree with the Stanley theory though. The 60s were when Stanley started cutting corners bad, but their castings from that era usually had a consistent look even when they were flawed. This sounds more like one of those no-name import planes that flooded the market back then, the ones that looked like Stanleys but were made with whatever scrap metal they had. You'd have to check the frog design and the lateral adjustment lever to really know, the cheap copies always had those details wrong.
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Bet you that thing actually was a Stanley from the 60s, just a bad casting that slipped through.
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william_harris12d ago
And you know what @victor_robinson, I can totally see that. Those old Stanley molds had some real issues with air pockets or just plain bad pours. A casting flaw that bad would explain the weird shape and the bubbly texture. Plus if it was a reject that somehow ended up in a set, nobody would have caught it until way later. Makes more sense than it being some completely different brand for sure.
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