Reply To: Anyone use/made a front handle on/for the Stanley 78?
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Yes.
I don’t know what Paul Sellers has written on the subject – I haven’t read his books – and at the risk of going seriously off-topic, this is a standard method of cutting rebates that calls for the side wall to be defined first.
There are lots a different types of rebate planes, the Record/Stanley 78/778 variants are just one. With this tool you’re not just planning a few light shavings, the intention is to remove large amounts of stock in heavy shavings to a depth – maybe 1/2 in, 5/8 in or more. Given that the sole is 1 ½ in wide, this is a serious amount of physical effort, even in soft pine it’s hard work. Using harder wood it is real graft. With this comes the risk of inaccuracies; the base goes off the level and the side wall gets a large number of sequential passes, which, more often than not leaves it uneven.
This is often overcome by dropping a groove where the side wall of the rebate needs to be. A well sharpened and accurate grooving plane will leave a neat trench with clean walls. The rebate plane can then be used with the fence set so that the blade edge is in mid-air in the trench. In hard wood, run two parallel grooves and cut each to the required depth in turn.
You can extend this technique further where the width of the required rebate is wider than your rebate plane. This way you don’t need a rebate plane, use the standard plane (No: 4 or a No: 5). Cut the ¼ in groove at the side edge as normal. Cut any parallel grooves that you feel necessary. (The width of the groove – nominally ¼” – just needs to be wider than the side web from the blade edge on your plane). Set the Plane to take a heavy cut and tip the edge in to the groove and begin cutting on the side until you have planed down enough for the side of the plane to run along the side wall of the rebate. Repeat this on the parallel grooves, then finish the lot to the required depth.
Hope that this explains it. In a nutshell, unless you confine yourself to flat boards only, a good quality grooving plane is essential in my opinion.