I am looking to get a good smoother, ive already posted about a lee valley 4 1/2, but i’ve been looking into their spiers kit plane, 239.00 for the WN (walnut i presume?) and 279 for the cocobolo, but they are offering 10% off, which brings the 239 down to 215. I can’t justify buying spending 469, nearly twice as much, for the norris, just for the adjustment mechanism. I have some time, and i know the lack of ease of adjustment, but i already have a tuned #4 for “rough” smoothing, and a tuned #5, so i plan on keeping it set up just for final smoothing. Also, I do have metalworking skills (best class in high school, lol), and the tools required to build it. The only thing i’m worried about is it not performing as well as a lie nielsen, because i know, out of the box, the lie nielsen is going to work well, and if it doesn’t, its got a nice guarantee. Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome, especially if you have used one of these, or even built one.
Thanks,
Nick
Replies
I just finished building the Norris A6 Shepherd kit. Ben Knebel and Doug Evans from Shepherd were in our area a few weeks ago and helped with a plane build session for our group. There were a few participants building the Spiers #7. The only difference in building between the two styles is attaching the Norris adjuster on the A6 and the rear tote was in three pieces instead of two. It wasn't as difficult as I had thought it would be, but it is time consuming. Whether is performs as well or better than an LN will depend on your attention to detail when putting the kit together and your efforts at tuning it. It's an excellent plane when put together and it performs well. It's nice and heavy and the comes with an excellent blade. I put roughly 15 hours into it. That's more than necessary to get a finished working plane. A lot of extra time went into "pimping" it with a high polish. :-) Having Ben and Doug around to help was great, but it's not necessary for a successful build. The kit is well thought out and the instructions are excellent. I had ZERO metalworking experience prior to this. Here is a link to the one I just completed. There are three pics of the plane there.
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/[email protected]/detail?.dir=200f&.dnm=aa91.jpg&.src=ph
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