I didn’t agree with everything Steve rants about here, but he does make some good points:
A small selection of bench planes: front to back, a jack plane, a junior Jack, a (garbage grade) #4 smoother, and a #3-equivalent smoother.
I’ve decided to punish humanity with a tool rant.
Back when I still had a real Internet connection, I put a video up on Youtube. In the video, I fixed up a $15 Harbor Freight wood plane, just to see if I could make it work. I got it to function, but I wouldn’t suggest anyone else try it.
A commenter said I should buy planes at garage sales. That set me off. The bag of pet peeves ruptured, and now I must rant.
Garage sales are only good for three types of people: mentally ill hoarders who buy crap, young people who live in poverty, and professional shoppers who snap up the best merchandise and put it on Ebay and Etsy.
That’s it. I will explain.
Say you’re 45 years old, and you decide you want a hand plane collection. To do woodworking well, you really need 4 or 5 planes, and you’re better off with a dozen. Different planes do different things well. Block planes are good for tight spaces and breaking corners. Jointing planes are good for jointing, obviously. Smoothing planes are good for, well, smoothing. Rabbet planes make rabbets. You can’t buy one plane and make it do everything. You’re going to need a bunch of planes.
You’ve already blown it by reaching 45 without collecting any planes. Now you have to catch up. Say you start going to garage sales.
Look at the paper or the web. There are no promising sales this week. Probably. Most of the time, the sales you read about look really bad. Action figures with missing arms and spit all over them, plus things like lamps with torn shades. IKEA furniture that ought to be burned. Maybe you’ll see a good sale in a couple of weeks. You may find 10 sales a year that are worth leaving the house for.
When you go to these sales, 9 of them will turn out to be losers. The other one will have one or two decent items.
To get those items, you will have to get up before the sun rises and do some driving. If you show up an hour after the sales start, the things you want will be gone. Tools go fast. Every city now has a fleet of professional shoppers who raid garage sales as early as possible and take all the good stuff. If you’re not there at the start, you’re dead. And what if you have two promising sales on the same day? You can get to one early enough to score, but you’ll be late for the other one
If you get the items you want, they probably won’t really be the items you want. By that I mean you won’t be able to choose brands and models. Want to collect a set of Stanley type 13 planes? Forget it. You’ll have to take a type 11, a 1990 plane from Home Depot, a Craftsman … whatever happens to be available. You will eventually get items that do what you want, but you’ll have to settle.
If you insist on good tools, you’ll have your woodworking shop equipped in about 20 years. During those years, you will have had to struggle without important tools. You will have had to forgo a lot of projects. You will become farsighted. You may get cataracts. You may get arthritis in your hands. You may need new hips. You’ll feel less like getting things done. The TV and the shuffleboard court will beckon.
You’ll miss out on the fun you would have had if you had bought your tools as early as possible.
You may drop dead, and then other people will buy your tools at your wife’s garage sale.
