The Stanley Bench Plane Page

Stanley Bench Planes Mini-Site Navigation

I've assembled a couple of resource pages related to Stanley bench planes. Please let me know of other handtool resources that could be converted to hypertext.

Welcome!: If you have a Stanley bench plane and you want to know roughly when it was made, you've come to the right place. Otherwise perhaps you'd be happier elsewhere.
How to use this page: Start by reading Patrick Leach's comments on Stanley plane dating. Then check out the Plane Dating Flowchart. If you thirst for heaps of data on plane dating, visit the Plane Type Study or the Plane Feature Timeline.
Plane Dating Flowchart: Get your bench plane in hand (unless you have it's features memorized) and start answering questions. This page leads you down a hypertext flowchart to determine your plane type. It includes links to Patrick Leach's original Plane Type Study and the Plane Feature Timeline.
One-Page Plane Dating Flowchart: Same as above, but in ASCII art instead of hypertext. Also, Steve Turner has made a fancy postscript version of the flowchart you can use to date planes while out in the field.
Plane Type Study: Here is Patrick Leach's more complete version of the type study, in hypertext form.
Plane Feature Timeline: This page shows you when various bench plane features were introduced and eliminated, so you can hopefully make sense of planes that don't exactly match the type study.
Stanley Blood & Gore: Follow this link to Patrick Leach's classic description of Stanley's cash cow planes -- in gory detail.
Acknowledgements: The information in this Web page is derived from a type study done by Roger Smith, in his book "Patented Transitional & Metallic Planes in America." Patrick Leach reformatted the type study and added comments based on his experience with Stanley planes. I converted the type study to hypertext and added the plane dating flowchart and feature timeline. Stan Faullin helped by providing some of the pictures used in the Plane Dating Flowchart, and Steve Turner provided the PostScript version of the flowchart.

I welcome your comments on the usefulness of this page. Let me know if I can improve it, especially if you find any errors. Thanks!