Stanley Bench Planes Mini-Site Navigation
Some History about these pages The Stanley Bench Plane Dating pages were created by a gentleman by the name of Jay Sutherland in the mid 1990's. Jay created these web pages to help people identify and establish the date their Stanley bench planes were manufactured. He based his pages on the work of Roger Smith and Patrick Leach. Patrick's Blood and Gore contains detailed descriptions and commentary on e ach of the numbered Stanley planes. Roger's work was published in his books PATENTED TRANSITIONAL & METALLIC PLANES IN AMERICA (PTAMPIA) volumes 1 and 2. Jay's plane dating pages were easy to use and became a valuable resource to the Old Tools community.
Some time in 2000-2001 Jay's Stanley Plane Dating pages went offline. Jay had finished his graduate work and the pages were lost when his web server acc ount was closed. The pages were unavailable for at least a year. In early 2002 several members of the email list, myself included, undertook to rescue Jay's work and make it available again. We used the WayBack machine to access archived copies of the pages. Eventually we were able to get all of Jay's original pages back online and the information spread across multiple web servers to prevent them from being lost again.
Jay's Stanley Bench Plane pages remain very popular today, getting several thousand unique visitors every month. I had a conversation with Jay a fe wmon ths ago and conveyed the appreciation of the many people who have contacted me to tell me they found his pages useful. These days jay isn't doing much work with old tools, but he told me he looks forward to rekindling his hobby when time permits. Jay reiterated his grattitutude toward people like Patrick and Roger who did a lot of the early reasearch and type studies related to Stanley planes.
I'm now beginning to re-write some of the Stanley Bench Plane Dating pages to make them a little more user-friendly. I'm trying to remove the frames, ta bles, etc. and incorperate more modern technologies like CSS, while attempting to preserve the original flow of Jay's pages. The content remains the same, and the original pages, in their original format are available here. I hope you enjoy these pages and find them useful! --Joshua