Stanley Bench Planes - History & Nomenclature
Stanley Bench Planes - A brief History and explanation of the range.
- 1857: Henry Stanley organized the company by combining local New Britain businesses, including Hall & Knapp and A. Stanley Company.
- Core Products: The company initially manufactured boxwood rules, levels, plumbs, and squares.
- The Bailey Patent (1869): The company purchased Bailey, Chaney and Company, securing the rights to Leonard Bailey’s innovative metal-bodied bench plane patents.
- This acquisition turned Stanley into the dominant manufacturer of woodworking hand planes in America.
These planes dominated the English speaking world right up until the invention of hand held equivalent power planes in and about the 1960’s and, along with a full suite of planes of numerous applications - router, moulding, block, rebate, compass, scrub, bullnose, plough, edge, shooting, scraper, shoulder etc, - remain an essential part of the equipment for current day artisan woodworkers who wish to pay homage to their forebears.
The bench plane range spanned from size 1 to size 8 with several variations e.g. a 4-1/2 and a 5-1/2 for wider body versions of a 4 and a 5.
There are sizes #1, #2, #3, #4, #4-1/2, #5, #5-1/2, #6 , #7 and #8.
The #1 through #4 are defined as Smoothers, the #5’s as Jack Planes, the #6 and #7 as Fore Planes and the Grandady #8 as a Jointer.
The #1 was a toy in retrospect, an indulgence with little practical use however for the millions of avid collectors worldwide highly sought after and valued in the thousands of dollars.
In an apparently early example of patent or copy protection Stanley employed obscure albeit legitimate machine thread standards - e.g. the Frog Mount screws are 7/32inch x 20teeth per inch (TPI), the brass adjusting wheel for blade feed is 9/32 x 24i tpi Left Handed.
As patents expired many clones were made world wide notably by Record in the UK who adopted the Stanley threads.
In very recent times Stanley have started to use Metric threads for some of the fasteners in their bench planes. These fasteners are incompatible with vintage Stanley bench planes.
See HERE for currently available Stanley and Stanley OEM bench plane spare parts.
