Here is some more poor man’s stuff for you to try. This week I went into Aldi with Liz and saw some granite worktop (countertop) savers reduced for closeout. The packages were torn. Now I do have a bonafide granite block certified to engineering tolerances so I didn’t need any more but for most people…

I added another plane in the mix or did I? Look at the two outer planes here. These two planes are put out by B&Q. Do they look different? Yes, they do! No, they’re not. Not altogether anyway. Now the third plane, centred here in the mix, came from a very different supplier. The two companies supplying these three…

Lever-cam lockdown out of sync This might seem innocuous, or even not apparent at all, but in the context of functionality this little adjustment assister makes a huge difference to the plane and especially so for the setting of the lever cap in relation to the pressure it applies to the cutting iron assembly. I first…

I dismantled the plane after initially rotating it and and tumbling from tote to knob to get my initial feelings and it didn’t feely rattly, loose or anything different than say a new Stanley. In fact it did feel better than a Stanley. Two things stood out visually immediately and perhaps most might not see…

Of course most of the time we might pass them up, but look what would have happened had I passed up the Aldi chisels six years ago. Seemed to me I should give a couple of inexpensive planes a fair try to see how they did and so I bought two from B&Q. The ask was…