- 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.
-
Plane Dating Flowchart (ASCII version)
- Same as above, but in ASCII art instead of hypertext. Not as cool to
use, but helpful if you want 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.
- 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.
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!
Last modified: February 10, 2002