Reply To: Skew rabbet + plow plane or combination plane?

Your location in the world may determine what older tools you may source, but it’s possible to keep basic rebates simple. Older tools are often very serviceable and still much cheaper, in the main, than the modern versions. Rarer old planes are often expensive and scarce because you’re competing with collectors and there are few in the wild any more…….

The most reached-for-general-purpose plough on my bench is the small Record 043; it originally came with only three narrow blades, but it will work in most woods with wider blades from other ploughs – up to about 5.8 inch wider where it does become a bit laborious. Deeper cuts can be made with bigger ploughs, obviously.

For this you only need a 1/4 inch wide blade; after marking the top and side edges of the rebates with a knife or cutting gauge, cut the rear wall of the rebate to depth with the plough: the remaining section can then be excavated down to your mark with an ordinary plane, No: 4 or 5, whichever you have. The limit with this method is that the plane will bottom-out when it reaches the base of the plough. You need a plough blade effectively a little wider than the side web of your plane.

It’s fair to say that the concept of metal skew planes, the Stanley No: 289, No: 46 etc., descended from old-school wooden ‘Badger’ planes, which still crop up from time to time in the UK on the second-hand market.
In form, a Badger plane resembles an ordinary wooden 15 inch fore-plane, except that the blade is mounted straight across the bed and skewed at about 22 degrees so that the right-hand point aligns at the right-hand edge of the bed – it’ll cut into a vertical rebate wall and continue cutting as the method I outlined above when the base has been reached.

There are many methods……Good luck