I've always heard that you can't walk through an antique store without tripping over a Stanley jack plane and I've mostly found that to be true until I started shopping for one. I was able to find a decent user for an okay price but I had to laugh because wooden planes and stanley transitionals outnumbered the iron planes about 10 to 1 today (okay, I'm counting a large collection of molding planes, but they were selling them individually).
I also managed to pick up a useless Stanley 42X that is frozen in time and in plunger. Resto projects abound. There were a couple of nicely priced disston sawsets as well, so I may be heading back tomorrow.
Getting back to the jack planes... I had 2 choices, one was older (post latteral but pre-war I think) and the other was probably late 50's. I went with the cheaper of the two, even though the handles had been crudely painted black. It had a mess of walnut shavings hiding under the frog which I took as a good sign. One side is off by about 1/32nd towards the top of the hump I'm not really too worried about it right now, but at some point I'll square it up. After sanding off the paint of the totes I put a coat of poly on them and called it a day. Reminds me of old wood flooring because the grain and pock marks still have a little bit of black from the paint.
Next I'll be shopping for a No 7 and then I'm done with planes for a while.
ccasion1
