Wooden Rabbet Plane

by Diefenbacher

Product Description

A hand tool users delight!. This simple, effective tool is designed and built to produce excellent results. The tough hornbeam body has an adjustable mouth (secured with a wing nut) making it possible to narrow the throat opening for fine cuts. The extra thick carbon steel blade eliminates flex and assures smooth, accurate cuts. Tune-up and blade adjustment instructions included.

Product Details

• ASIN: B000VDZ3YY
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #540,207 in Home Improvement (See Top 100 in Home Improvement)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Too much effort, June 13, 2011

By 

Daniel M. Wyant "Hedge" (Columbus, OH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Wooden Rabbet Plane (Misc.)

To begin, I am an experienced plan user. I have a nearly complete collection of Stanley and like, #3-#7 and various block planes...all of which I have cleaned, lapped and restored myself to use. I like to tinker and refine my tools to meet my needs.

Against my better judgment, I ordered this Rabbet Plane to fill a need for a cleaning up tenons and work close to shoulders. I have not had much luck with wooden planes...I find them overly fussy...in constant need of adjustment because when the temperature or humidity changes, the set changes. After time invested, it is nice to have settings remain constant until the next sharpening touch-up. When I received this item,I was impressed with the nice solid block of hornbeam and the substantial iron, which I proceeded to sharpen to my usual standards of shaving finger hair with little effort.

I reset the cap iron and installed the iron in the body for a thin set. I noticed the cap iron did not meet the iron on the flat, so I went about honing the cap iron to fit. After about 3 hours of this fiddling and fettling I gave up, as I was unable to get a tight enough fit to the iron to prevent the shaving from riding up under the cap iron and jamming the whole works beyond utility.

As a regular hand tool user and admirer, I fully expect a new tool to take a bit of set up time and work to get the desired result...sharpening, adjusting, lapping and protecting are all prices to be paid. But, I found the cap iron on this Plane so poorly made to begin with, that I was unwilling to invest any more than 3 hours to make it run...I went upstairs and ordered a proper cast iron Shoulder Plane from Lee Valley...something I should have done originally.

5.0 out of 5 stars Splendid product, easy-to-use, good value, May 26, 2009

By 

G. Conner (USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wooden Rabbet Plane (Misc.)

This is an ancient, but still effective design. Like all the E.C. Emmerich planes I have used, it is of superb quality.

E.C.E. manages to modernize their planes just enough without completely reinventing them, and without beating your wallet to death. They offer different models, with different features in different price ranges. This plane uses the simple but effective wedge to hold the blade so it is less expensive than the "Primus".

You can easily adjust it like any wedged plane by tapping on it (lightly) with a small brass or wooden mallet. This is not difficult or "fussy" after you have practiced enough to "get the hang of it." They provide directions with the plane and on their website.

You can also do what I do...

Set the plane on a granite flat block, ( or float glass or marble floor tile---any reasonably FLAT surface)
I put two pieces of paper underneath the plane so that the body sits on the paper, but the blade will touch the bare surface. (NO paper below the mouth-opening)

GENTLY lower the blade until it just touches the flat surface, then press the wedge in place by hand. Pick the plane up and tap the wedge with your lightweight mallet until it is "seated" fully. You can tell by the sound and the feel when the wedge is fully seated. Bingo. Your blade now protrudes exactly the thickness of those pieces of paper and will be perfectly parallel to the base.

For REALLY thin shavings, I use pages from old phone books which are very thin, (about .002") and remarkably consistent in thickness. For thicker shavings, try stock printing paper.

This plane also has an adjustable mouth which actually does help in some situations. (wood with reversing grain or highly figured grain.) Most of the time, I leave the mouth open wider than some "experts" recommend. That just makes the shavings easier to evacuate.

But if you do need to close the mouth, one great advantage of this wooden plane is that you can't hurt the blade by running it into the wooden mouth-opening. (My friend has an expensive metal shoulder-plane that he banged up doing just that... he put the blade in upside down by mistake! I was able to fix it for him in a few minutes, but still that is more work than you want to do if you don't have to.

Another thing I love about my wooden planes is how easy they are to maintain. I don't have to worry about the body rusting, so once I wipe the blade with oil and put it in the plane, the only "care" it requires is proper storage, away from moisture and extreme temperature changes.

Wooden planes are a breeze to "true" too. If I have to tune-up a badly worn plane, particularly an old rusty "flea-market find", a large plane can take hours of honing to get flat and square by hand. Any wooden plane can be trued in minutes with a good flat surface, ( like that granite gauge-block) and some standard abrasives.

I now have a number of new wooden planes including some hand made Asian planes and a few I have made myself. Also, I used to have an enormous collection of hand-made wooden planes. My dad was a violin repairman and pattern-maker. I worked in his shop for almost forty years. so I have a lot of experience with many types of planes and hand-tools in general. I have to say that the E.C. E. planes are THE BEST wooden production planes I have ever seen.

If you do not need the more-expensive "primus" models, because you use the tool infrequently, these wedged-style planes are a great way to go. They offer good performance at a very reasonable price, and if you need to "soup-it-up" for a special job or difficult woods, it can easily do as well as any metal plane on the planet. You just have to know how to adjust it and maybe get a High-Speed Steel blade.

It is easier for manufacturers to make the wedge from softer woods, but E.C. Emmerich does not do that. They know that softer wood will compress over time ( not long) and will prevent accurate adjustment. So they machine-cut and hand fit these wedges from hard hornbeam or other dense stable woods. You will appreciate this when you have to set the blade very fine or for deeper more-aggressive cuts.

They use good steel too. The stock blades are just fine for most work. When I have a particularly hard or "grainy" piece to work, I install an HSS steel blade from Academy Saw. (I had to regrind the blade slightly to fit because of the size. These are German made tools so they use metric measurement.) With the perfectly honed High-Speed Steel blade, this simple tool cuts as well as "boutique" planes I have tried that cost over SIX TIMES as much.

If you need a good rabbet plane for a reasonable price, this is a good choice.

If you are on a budget but need the best possible performance in difficult wood, this plane is capable of supreme accuracy and longer wear before sharpening, with the HSS blade upgrade and some careful tweaking. You still will have less than two hundred invested in the tool and it works great!

I chose the large jointing plane from E.C.E. because it is wood, so much lighter than metal. That makes a huge difference when you have to plane big boards flat! I was so impressed I then got the Primus smoothing plane. It cuts as well as any smoothing plane I have ever used, and that includes several expensive "infill" planes.

I don't often have a need for a rabbeting plane, so I chose this model because of it low price. It is one of the best bargains for any tool I have even gotten. I mostly use it with the stock blade, but when I need to tackle some difficult wood, ( like an antique curly Maple piano bench I repaired last week) this thing came through like a champion.

ALL the E.C. Emmerich planes I have tried are great. And this one is an incredible bargain to boot.