I am a collector of woodplanes, there is a fancy name for it but I can’t remember what it is. As mentioned on the introduction to this website I inherited a substantial collection of woodplanes from my father. That was my starting point, and over the last 20 years I have tripled it in size to now have over 600 examples. If you went into a hardware store today (such as the big Green Shed) you would only see a handful of woodplanes which would make you wonder how I could end up with over 600. But the reality is that over the centuries people have come up with many ways to shape and finish wood so that it could be used for specific purposes.
Collectors often specialize and focus on only one (or a few) aspects of the area they are interested in. However I take a rather eclectic view of it and aim to get as much variety as possible to show both the ingenuity of the maker or the desire to copy and ride on the coat-tails of those who led the way.
I’ll talk more about my collection and specific tools in it in future blogs, but this time I want to focus on some recent acquisitions.
A very good friend approached me last year about taking on the wood planes that had been owned and used by his Uncle which had already been passed down once and with the death of this family member risked being split up and possibly discarded. Unfortunately it is not very often a fairly full collection of a single users tools becomes available and stays together, this gave me the opportunity to retain them in a single collection.
The Uncle had been a carpenter in the early to mid-20th Century in NSW (having migrated from the UK) and was the carpenter involved in the c.1929 building of the Kiama Hospital – so he had a link to our local history. The planes were a collection of wooden moulding planes plus a number of metallic bench planes. All required a little bit of restoration but were not far off being usable.
Of the 29 wooden planes, a maker’s mark was found on 26 and I was able to date these to the general period of their manufacture in the UK. Most were produced in the mid-19th Century with one possibly as early as 1820. Based on owners stamps they had been passed from owner to owner until my friend’s Uncle took ownership. It says a lot for the quality of workmanship in the tools that they had a working life of over 100 years.
The metallic planes were the relatively common Stanley and Record bench planes from the mid-20thCentury which would have been the tradesman’s first choice at that time and are probably considered as being from a period when the best quality user planes were being produced.
For me, it was an honour to rejuvenate these planes and to investigate their history.