My Thoughts on the Veritas® Low-Angle Smooth Plane
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| Photo courtesy Lee Valley Tools |
Last spring, I bought one of two brand new hand planes, both from Lee Valley. One was the Veritas® medium shoulder plane. The other was their low-angle smooth plane. Most of my planes are restored derelicts purchased on Ebay or from yard sales. So the decision to get this plane didn’t come without a lot of thought. And the only new plane I’ve purchased up until then was a cheap little trimming plane from the BORG.
Now, you can read all sorts of lengthy reviews of this plane all over the web. But I want to talk about why I decided on this plane.
Quality of Design. I can honestly say I’ve never used a Lie-Nielsen smoother. I never had any acquaintances that owned one, and I couldn’t justify the expense of buying one. And I’ve already got a bunch of old Stanley smoothers. My thoughts (besides cost) were that if the Lie-Nielsens were basically Stanley designs, what advantages do they have?
It’s pretty obvious from looking at the Veritas planes that the designers went back to the drawing board. I’m sure they looked at the physics of planing, ergonomics, economics of manufacturing, and overall usability. After using the low angle smoother for a while, I’d say they pretty much hit them all dead on.
I like the adjustable mouth. A lot of my planing is for that glass-smooth surface, so I set it for a fine mouth and make whisper-thin shavings.
The adjustment mechanism is simple, but highly effective and operates smoothly. I have no problems adjust the depth of cut or lateral position of the iron.
The cap iron is even well-designed with a broad clamping foot that spreads the clamping pressure on the iron, keeping it in place. I can get secure clamping on the iron without overtightening and still be able to adjust the iron.
Cost Effective. For a mass-produced plane, I consider the Veritas planes middle-of-the-road in terms of price. They’re more expensive than the poorer quality Stanleys but not quite as expensive as the Lie-Nielsens.
Versatile. I chose the smoother over the Veritas bevel-up smoother because of its sides being machined square to the sole. One of my next projects is to build a shooting board, so I wanted a low-angle plane with machined sides.
Another thing I like about the low-angle plane is that I can change the bevel angle simply by switching out irons. That’s something you can’t do on traditional bench (bevel-down) planes unless you want to get into the complexities of back bevels. Lee Valley has irons available for this and other planes that are ground at various bevels.
I’ve found myself using this plane for the majority of my smoothing needs. There have only been a few exceptions where a change in grain direction has caused problems with the low cutting angle. I’d get tearout, but it was easily cleaned up with one of my traditional bench smoothers with its higher cutting angle.
Overall, I’m thrilled with the Veritas Low-Angle smoother and would recommend it to any woodworker that values great engineering and quality manufacturing.
Robb said,
My current most favorite plane for daily use is a simple Stanley 60 1/2″ low-angle block plane, because it cuts such a silky finish on just about everything even with the factory standard blade (as long as I keep it sharp!) So when I started looking for a new, larger smoothing plane, I naturally started looking for a low-angled model and was looking at the Lie Nielsen and Lee Valley Veritas bevel-up and low-angle models and was leaning towards the LV low-angle for virtually identical reasons as you. So, reading your thoughts on the Veritas model helped “close the deal” on my decision.
Thanks again!
(posted on November 10th, 2006 at 4:59 pm)