I ruined a vintage Stanley No. 5. Will history forgive me?
This is a Stanley Bailey No. 5 Type 20 , manufactured 1962-67, that I purchased as a $4 reminder to get a tetanus booster at a local estate sale. That felt about right for a paint-splattered plane with a broken tote, an iron ground to a sloppy, uneven bevel, and a cup in the sole you could drink out of. No historical value. Not rare. Not pre-war. Not special.
Perfect.
At the risk of upsetting originalists, this wasn't a restoration and I'm not going to call it one, and I'm not sorry.
By the early '60s, Stanley had figured out what every company eventually figures out: that you'll keep buying it even as they make it worse. A little worse, a little worse, every year, banking on you never noticing because they made sure to never tell you. An uneducated consumer is a loyal consumer. A helpless person is a repeat customer.
The bed was painted blue instead of the durable black japanning. The rosewood knob and tote were long gone, replaced with stained hardwood. The substantial lateral adjuster with its clean lines is now a single piece of stamped steel. Sixty years of margin-shaving cowardice, and this plane was a compromise before it ever hit a store shelf.
So it's black now. I took to the buffing wheel parts that the factory never bothered to polish. I turned a new knob and cut a new tote from local reclaimed ash.
I didn't preserve this plane. I rehabilitated it. And I made it mine.
A $4 chunk of iron three steps from the scrap bin doesn't owe the past anything. The world tells us to throw it away and buy a new one, preferably plastic, preferably this quarter, preferably with 2 day prime shipping. They spent six decades making it worse. It took a weekend to make it produce a finer shaving than it did the day it left the factory.
Sharpen your steel. Hoard the cast-offs. Save the broken thing the world tells you to throw away until they’re standing in an empty room wondering where all the customers went. They can't sell to someone who can fix their own things. She is free. He is dangerous. They are ungovernable.
They build them to be forgotten. This one, at least, isn't going anywhere. I hope you like it.