Facebook Marketplace is often a good source of bargain priced planes. It can also have postings for plenty of overpriced ones as well.
I regularly trawl it looking for ones I don’t have or for good bargains.
Today I saw a listing for a group of 6 planes and a spokeshave for what seemed a good price. Closer examination of the photo revealed that one of the planes was a Record No.6SS which appeared in excellent condition. This in itself was worth more than the asking price for the whole group.
I made an offer slightly below the asking price and that was accepted. So, I made the 1/2 hour trip to pick them up.
The surprise was that the Record No.6SS had been sold already and the seller hadn’t realised that it was shown in the photo. Looking quickly at the remaining planes, I considered it wasn’t worth the outlay as I already had examples of all of them. However the seller was eager to get rid of them and offered them to me at half the price, so I decided to take them – thinking that I might be able to on-sell them at a slight profit.
Getting them home and having a closer look, found that what I had originally thought was a user painted Stanley No.4 was in fact a Type 20 Stanley No.3 with the blue paint correct for a Type 20. That one plane more than paid for the batch.
So, I ended up with:
- Type 20, Stanley No.3
- Falcon/Pope 9 in. (the tote had been repaired, but I can replace it with one I had lying around.
- A copy of a Stanley 110 Blockplane
- A folded metal (cheap) Trojan Blockplane
- A nice little Chinese Thumbplane – cast iron so relatively heavy for it’s size
- A Stanly 151R spokeshave – missing it’s Japanning and with a non-original iron
I also ended up with a nice solid timber box which will be handy for holding some of my work in progress.
So – THE LESSON – don’t always believe the Marketplace photo, items may appear in them that the seller did not intend to be shown. And, be prepared to walk away from a purchase if it isn’t what you thought it would be.