Traditional Tool
ECE PLANES
When the Bailey-pattern metal plane, bristling with screw adjustments, arrived in the UK from America, the wooden hammer-adjusted plane was pushed aside like the horse-and-cart before the motor car. Solid beech plane stocks were retired as door stops or went to the fire in a last blaze of glory warming the inglenook. But a renaissance in hand skills has stirred a hunger for these old ‘woodies’ which – for the traditional shipwright especially – are as symbolic as they are practical, with wood as a boatbuilding material having rebounded from near extinction during the age of plastic.
As surviving wooden planes are dusted o for us to marvel at their scars and improvised repairs bespeaking a lifetime of hard graft, their historical interest often outweighs their potential as feasible working tools. Meanwhile commercial wooden plane-making in the UK has all but disappeared such that an English-pattern jack plane costing ‘thirty bob’ in 1960 could set you back £300 if sourced from a boutique maker now. Finding new wooden planes that are high quality and aordable isn’t easy.
Fortunately our woodworking colleagues across the North Sea were less easily convinced by Bailey’s new-fangled planes, perhaps because their preference is for a prominent front handle or ‘horn’ diering markedly from the English pattern, and wooden plane-making has survived there without interruption. In Remscheid, Germany the firm of E.C. Emmerich founded by master craftsman Friedrich-Wilhelm Emmerich in 1852 has not only persevered with the wooden plane but developed and improved it, with today’s range running from a pocket-sized adjustable block plane through smoothers, jacks, routers, rebate and plough planes, to a handsome try plane and specialist veneering tools.
Comprising just the wooden body, wedge and single iron, it appears this model 105S jack plane, used for squaring timber and smoothing away saw marks, could hardly be more simple. Closer investigation reveals the precise fitting of abutments against the wedge, subtle shaping of the horn to suit a right-handed worker (a left-handed version is available) and an intriguing ‘castellated’ joint between the hard-wearing hornbeam sole and the stock. Work has burnished the hornbeam to glide effortlessly over the wood. By contrast, the effort of overcoming an iron jack’s inertia soon grows tiring.
Today’s equivalent of this plane with a redesigned wedge support costs around £65, and there’s an even better version with a lignum vitae sole.