As contemporary cabinet making practice has changed and evolved to incorporate the use of more machines and power tools, the use of hand planes has been reduced considerably. In many cases jobs are jigged up to be sawn and jointed directly from the saw, passed through the thickness sander assembled, sprayed and delivered. In an industrial or small batch situation this would almost certainly be the most efficient way of working. However when one is making individual objects the approach is rather different. Here one aims to cut one components and make ones joints as close as possible using the machine, but inevitably final fitting and finishing is then down to hand work and it is in this areas that specialist planes, as distinct from the usual smoothing plane and jack plane come into their own.

These are planes that are used to just slightly enlarge that rebate by a 10th of a millimetre. To take a whisker off one of the shoulders of that tenon because the joint isn't going up quite tight enough due to timber movement since the mortise and tenon was cut. These are planes to trim and fit. These are precision tools used by a skilled cabby to overcome the inevitable minor irregularities that occur when using timber in a precise way. First lets look at narrow planes.

As you can see from the photographs, there are two basic types of narrow plane. The first and most common is the shoulder plane. This, as the name suggests is mainly used across the end grain of components. Most of these planes are fitted with the blade set at a low angle in the body, sometimes 18 or 20 degrees. They are also set with the bevel of the blade facing upwards making a combined cutting angle of approximately 50 degrees. This makes the shoulder plane ideally suited for working end grain and of course across the grain, in situations where a dadoe needs to be slightly enlarged or the side of the cabinet needs to be flattened after assembly. There are two or three sizes of shoulder plane available. Basically most cabinetmakers need one large shoulder plane for straightening out carcasses and dealing with larger work and one or two smaller shoulder planes for more delicate tenons or small rebates. A favourite is the 410 shoulder plane made by CLICO , which is a delicate and nicely sized plane for general cabinet work.

The sharpening of shoulder planes is identical to the sharpening of a chisel. It's important that the blades are sharpened dead straight and at right angles to their sides, as the setting up of the blade in the body of the plane should slightly protrude on either side of the body in order to cut into the corner of a rebate. In most cases blades are ground to 25 degrees and then honed to somewhere between 25 and 30 degrees. On some occasions when working high density woods like Rosewood this has been changed to grinding at say 20 degrees and honing at between 20 and 25 degrees. This gives nice feathery slices when working across the grain but makes the edge of the plane iron rather delicate and prone to damage.

Compare these shoulder planes with the wooden bodied Primus plane made in Germany by E.C.E. and imported into Britian by EMIR. This is a lovely plane, beautifully made with a nice sweet acting adjustment. It is about 30mm or 1 inch in width so it would easily replace the largest shoulder plane in the average cabinetmakers armoury, and it's fitted with a rather nice adjustable mouth. Another unusual feature about this plane is that unlike the shoulder plane this is fitted with a blade with a back iron like the conventional bench plane. It's also set at a slightly higher cutting angle than the conventional bench plane - at about 55 degrees. This is equivalent to the York pitch used on some fine finishing planes. Al;though this is described by its makers as a rebate plane, especially suited to working with the grain, I've found that it functions very well across the grain and also on end grain. It's slightly less versatile than the shoulder plane because being set with a bevel down it means the cutting angle cannot be altered. This is one of the major benefits of planes set with the bevel up. It's possible with some effort to change the cutting angle. I will come back to this later when describing blockplanes and mitre planes. Completing the armoury of narrow planes is the bull nose plane. Although I've got a very pretty Norris bull nose plane I must confess to not using it very much. A bull nose plane is theoretically used for working up against the end of a rebate or against assembled components. I think really this is one of those specialist planes that unlike the planes I have described so far, has been made fairly obsolete by the advent of the router. So unless you are cutting a lot of stopped rebates I wouldn't advocate buying one.

Now small block planes, mitre planes and chariot planes, are quite a different matter. I can't think how any cabby can get by without a nice little block plane somewhere close at hand. I have two small planes in my toolbox. The first is a

Stanley 60 1/2. This is a lovely little tool. It has the benefit of a movable front section which enables one to adjust the cutting aperture in front of the blade. This is called the mouth and can be closed right up tight when working difficult timbers. My other plane is a very similarly sized but totally different plane made by Bristol Design. Whereas the Stanley plane has a nice little knurled knob adjustment at the back the Bristol plane has a tap and try adjustment. Personally I don't worry about tap and try adjustments I have enough planes adjusted in that way to feel quite comfortable just getting that extra thickness of shading by gently tapping the end of the blade with a small steel hammer. The beauty of the Bristol Design plane is its' solidity. The blade is supported to within 2 millimetres of the cutting edge, unlike the Stanley which really overhangs the supporting sole of the plane by a good 4 millimetres. So the Bristol Design plane iron will have much less inclination to chatter and vibrate. This is really the benefit of a hand made plane over a mass produced plane. You spend a lot of money on a Bristol plane but there is no doubt in my mind this will be money well spent - if your pockets are deep enough. Alongside the two small block planes, I have a larger mitre plane by Norris. This is pure ostentation on my part. I find that bevel up planes are so useful in tackling difficult wild grained timbers that I am so frequently working with that I can just about justify the expense of a mitre plane. It's one of those tools that are not used very often but when it is used there is nothing else that would have done the job. The benefit of these bevel up planes - for that is the category we are talking about is their versatility. These are small bench planes differentiated from the smoother or the jack plane by having no back iron and having the blade set in the body with the bevel facing upwards. The beauty of these planes and as Michael Caine would say "No many people know this", is that the overall cutting angle can be adjusted. So, for example, if one is working with nice easy going Sycamore then the standard cutting angle of 50 degrees would be fine and dandy. If however that were Ripple Sycamore then it might be sensible to have a cutting angle of 55 or 60 degrees. This ladies and gentlemen, can be achieve by changing the angle at which you grind and subsequently hone, your cutting iron. When we were working a lot of Ripple Sycamore I kept a spare iron for one of my block planes set with a grinding angle of 35 degrees and a honing angle of about 40 degrees. When this was set in my little block plane it gave a total cutting angle of 60 degrees. The plane required a lot of effort to push it through the timber but it cut sweetly and didn't tear the wild undulating fibres of the Ripple Sycamore so saving me time and sparing the expense on abrasives.

For those of you who seek to work timber with a cutting edge rather than abrasive and also seek to trim joints with the slicing cut of a shoulder plane rather than a screaming router, I can commend these planes to you. By all means search second hand tool sales for mitre planes and antique shoulder planes but these are not necessary. Many of the shoulder planes and block planes produced by todays manufacturers like Primus, Clifton and Stanley, can be relied upon to give us good products that can be fettled and adjusted and turned into real precision instruments, worthy of a skilled cabinetmaker.