Reply To: Skew rabbet + plow plane or combination plane?
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Hej Nicholas,
A few thoughts, probably of not that much relevance.
A potential advantage with the rebate planes might be that they allow for angled fences, which allow some woodworkers (i.e. me) to achieve more consistent results when bevelling panels or edges. Whether this is achievable with the Veritas combination plane, I don’t know.
Rebate planes are also quite useful for squaring edges. The Veritas jack rebate plane does a very good job as long as the boards aren’t too long. In addition, it can function as a jack, though a second, mildly crowned blade, is required.
The combination plane and the jack rebate plane can be worked in both directions of a board. The skewed rebate plane and the plough plane are either right or left handed. Sometimes, despite deep notching, unfavourable grain has forced me to pull the right handed plough plane towards med. I’ve been more fortunate when it comes to rebating.
A different comments exchange made me check the precision of these planes, and with one exception they appear pretty flawless. The accuracy of replacement plough plane blades is, I think, a concern. After having notched for a groove and mortice, using a fixed width 3/8″ double scoring blade, I found that the 3/8″ plough plane blade was clearly wider. The Lie-Nielsen double scoring blade is perfectly congruent to the width of my Lie-Nielsen 3/8″ mortice chisel, and that was very accurate, deviating by ≈0.02 mm. The plough plane blade was off +0.16 mm. That forced me to grind the blade down (positively detest that activity); and to set up a study. I measured the width of all my 26 plough plane blades, taking care to be consistent and with three repetitions. The result was quite interesting, I think. The 1/4″ blades my three plough planes came with were all within <0.05 mm deviation from the nominal; so were also the occasional 8 mm and 10 mm blades. All other blades were off. When comparing all the left handed to the right handed, the left handed ones were statistically significantly more deviating than the right handed (0.114 mm, SE=0.045: p=0.018, 95% CI=0.022 – 0.207). Furthermore, the range of deviation was smaller for the right handed blades, and they were below the nominal widths, which means that they make grooves that can be adjusted, something that does not appear very easy with the too wide grooves by the left handed blades.
The plough planes are a delight to work with. Both they and the rebate planes could benefit from longer depth stops, and longer and wider fences.