![]() That tends to make them the standard for comparison. The name is best known, usually the first brand we encounter as a vintage collector or for restoration as a user plane in the unplugged market. There are far more Stanley hand planes to be found than any other vintage brand. I think most of us will agree that Stanley was the obvious leader in vintage hand plane sales. Break a X plane or a Shaw’s patent and you will be waiting a long time to find parts or a replacement and be prepared to open your wallet.” Break a Bedrock and parts or a replacement are relatively easy to get. (Sorry LN fans but that based upon using a Bedrock with a hock iron/cb and a LN) From the 3 listed above I would pick the Bedrock but only because of how many that Stanley made. With a better iron/chip breaker the Bedrock is as good as any LN/Veritas made today. Really too bad that Stanley didn’t put a better iron/cap iron in the bedrock to distinguish it from the Stanley Bailey. On the negative they do need more tuning than the other 2 and you will spend a couple of hours getting it right. ![]() The Bedrock flat top is by far the coolest looking plane on the planet but that is only my opinion. I really don’t find a lot of advantages to buying a Bedrock over a Bailey with one exception. Third on my list of must haves would be the Bedrock. With a better iron the Shaw’s patent would challenge the X plane as the best IMO. Smooth as silk and stupidly easy to adjust. The iron adjustment is simple and straightforward and if you want a plane that requires next to nothing for tuning pick this plane. The Union X plane has an amazing Iron/cap iron combo that is second to none and in my mind comparable to what you can get from today’s manufacturers. That being said though there are some distinct advantages over Bailey planes. All 3 of these are solid user planes but the performance/cost of any of these 3 planes isn’t any better in my opinion than a well-tuned Bailey plane. Moving over to the non-Bailey patent planes the 3 contenders in my mind are Stanley Bedrock, Sargent Shaw’s Patent and Union X-plane. I haven’t yet tried Ohio or Millers Falls so can’t give you my opinion on that but someday soon I will give the MF a try. The cheeks on the early ones that I have looked at seem to be somewhat thin and in fact I have 2 No 5’s with cracks in the cheeks so make sure you look them over carefully before buying. The only issue with Union that I have found is that for whatever reason they are usually terribly abused, and it might be hard to find a nice one with no issues. A pre-Stanley version will tune relatively quickly, and the irons are pretty decent. Stay away from the post Stanley ones as the quality drops really fast after Stanley bought them. People generally pay you to take them away as they can’t even give these things away. Union is right there as well and right now in today’s market if I were looking for a plane that I can buy for the best price and achieve the best results it would have to be Union. I find that Sargent irons take a bit longer to sharpen than Stanley but hold an edge slightly better. If it doesn’t work as I like, then I will tune, and the needed time is less than an hour. With Sargent I normally just sharpen the iron and go. In my experience Stanley will generally take a couple of hours to check and get tuned. ![]() The least work and generally at a price point of 2/3 of the Stanley. Easiest I have found to tune would have to go to Sargent. As a new user, not a lot has to be done to get acceptable results and with just a bit more effort can work almost as good as the premium planes offered today. I would take Stanley Bailey just based on the number of them available. “I agree that most Bailey pattern planes can be tuned to provide mostly equivalent results. This was an answer to the Question, “When speaking of Bailey type hand planes as users, the difference between a high quality plane and a lower quality plane is the difference in time it takes to tune it. I thought it would be good to add some thoughts and post it where it can be found for future reference. The following quote was a post made by Casey Benton on a Facebook conversation. ![]()
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