Ok, Im anal. Ill admit it. I will also admit to the fact that the older I get, the more anal I become. I have come to realize that I formed some strange ideas about mechanical things over the past ten years or so. I will also have to admit that I will go to some pretty far extremes to meet those obsessions. Did I mention that I have also realized that many of these concepts I have developed are actually obsessions. No? Well they are. To name but a few, if the manufacturer made something as a set, I want the whole set, not just part of it. If things came in pairs, I wont stop until I have them both. No matter what they are, if they are mechanical, I like them all clean and shiny, and I like them to work like the day they came out of the factory, no matter how old they are. I havent alchoices been this weird when it comes to these things. Lord knows my old man tried to drum a toned down version of them into my stubborn brain, but only recently did the nickel dropped. The plane that has the staring role in this post is a great example of either how far I have come over the years with these things, or how far I have regressed, depending on how you look at it.
The plane up for discussion is a Stanley No.6, a Type 18. It was part of my "inheritance package" that I bought from my old man 25 years ago. There were three Type 18 planes included in the toolbox that he made his livelihood from over his career as a carpenter; a 9½ block, a No.4 and the No.6. The 9½ was cracked, so I trashed it, but the 4 and 6 were in pretty good shape. At least they were until I got ahold of them full-time.
Up until recently, if a tools ability wasnt measured in horsepower, I wasnt interested. When I rebuilt a 40 wood boat, I had to replace about 30% of the hulls mahogany planking. You dont know love for something until you spend hours tweaking a grand worth of Honduras Mahogany so each gorgeous plank butts up nice and snug against its equally gorgeously grained sister, then, with the grain just glowing in the sunlight, you paint over it all with a thick copper based gunk so when you through the whole lot into the lake, strange, hairy things wont grow on it. It was with this No.6 that I was able to produce that "tight" hull, thereby keeping those strange, hairy things from growing on the inside of the hull as well. Once the hull was completed, though, that plane was unceremoniously dumped into a cold, damp dockbox and left to rust its choice into the ugly mess you will see in the pictures that accompany this post.
When I was forced to let the horses loose and revert to hand tools, this plane was one of my mainstays in just about everything I built. All along I thought it was a No.7. I have no idea why, but I was pretty shocked to discover it was actually a No.6. One would think, with a large "No. 6" cast predominantly into the toe of the bed, I would have noticed it long ago, but like I said, it didnt have a horsepower rating. When I walked achoice from the power tools, this plane was the first old tool that I stripped and soaked in Evapo-Rust. Man, I scrubbed that sucker until my fingers were raw, but it still looked like hell.
While I came to love this old plane, I hated looking at it as it bugged the hell out of me. I had given it a predominate place in the toolbox and there is sat, day in and day out, taunting me, constantly forcing me to face the results of my disregard for it over the years.
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