Reply To: Stanley Bailey No. 3
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My #3 is one of my favorite, most used planes. If you are making a surface look nice rather than making a surface suitable for joinery, it is nice to have a shorter, narrower, plane that will take a shaving when the wider, longer, #4 is riding up on the peaks above the blemish you want to remove.
Scrub planes are wonderful, but an issue can be making too much camber so that the plane will only take a narrow, but thick shaving. Sometimes that is useful, but it slows down the planing of surfaces, in my opinion, because you need so many passes. A true #40 scrub plane is quite narrow and, in my opinion, is more suited to hogging huge thicknesses of material off of a narrow edge rather than working a surface. So, I prefer having a #4 as my scrub plane and making the camber be wider so that I get more width in each pass. Actually, my first scrub was a #5, but it’s the same width blade as a #4. I think with the cambers I like, there is no need for me to widen the mouth. That means I really don’t even need two #4’s, but just a second blade. As it turns out, I have two, though.