Several unlikely predictions and some clichéd northernisms.

When we have another Cretaceous-finale Chicxulub size impact, in the aftermath two things would survive to see the new world order, cockroaches and wooden rebate planes. Everyone has some of these skewed planes, I have some I never see, but they’re there, lurking sullenly waiting for their big day, always there. If I can find these harbingers of our eventual disastrous Hollywood moment, I will take a photo, but they’re just blocks of wood with a blade.

However, there are some more interesting alternatively-square metal planes, amongst them, the Record 712, 713 and 714 and the Stanley 140. I can’t say much about something if I haven’t actually got one so I’ll ignore the 714 as if it never existed. It will be like the older brother to the other two Record boys who somewhere along the way went wrong and now the rest of the family won’t even mention his number.

Mentioning things going unmentioned, nothing more has been said about my sister-in-law and Pete-mate parting. Though superficially this seems relatively inconsequential for everyone other than them, I have a premonition that it could be the catalyst to a dramatic soapy-moment that changes everything dramatically. I expect the whole story will come gushing out when I do some overdue mother-in-law sealing, that’s not a euphemism, she really does need something carefully smeared round the rim of her 60mm waste-outlet.

Living in the south of England where, as every northerner knows, by law there must be scatter cushions in every bus-shelter, we can easily overlook how tough and monochrome it is up there.

“Mr Hampton sir, I’ve designed this new plane with t’skewed blade, I was thinking about some improvements like a proper enclosed rear handle?”

“Nay lad, that lump sticking up is just t’ticket“

“A nice fence with t’two arms ?”

“Nay lad, think of t‘cost”

“A screw type adjuster for t’blade Mr Hampton sir?”

“Nay lad, needless luxury lad”

“What about a spur for planing across t’grain?”

“Nay lad, are you from t‘south by t’way?”

“Can we call it t’759 ?”

“Nay lad, far too much, call it….. t’712”

And so, somewhere in the backstreets of North, in a blaze of indifference it was born, the plane that could have been a contender, if only…..

To be fair, perhaps Record saw that the American 289 only had another 15 years in production and so it wasn’t worth copying or maybe they, like Churchill, foresaw the coming conflict and thought, no point in making something fancy because we’ll have to stop half way through the war anyway and make bullets. Whatever, it doesn’t seem to have been produced for long, consequently there aren’t that many around. I bought mine really to just have a look at them. My middle name is decadent, I have all my cravats made by Lithuanian monks from material woven entirely from the fur combed secretly at night from rabbits that are kept as pets in just one particular street in Hemel Hempstead.

They seem too big for a plane to make fine joint adjustments and too small for removing a lot of wood; but being skewed they do work very well across the face of a large tenon, which is good as it has cured me of indulging in the frankly unnatural practice of using a shoulder plane for this. For small tenons there is the Stanley 140, a skew-bladed block plane with a prosthetic side, once this is removed it will plane right up to an edge. If all the hours of searching through shavings to find the weird-thread screws that hold this side on had been used constructively over the last hundred years we might now be travelling to work in hovercrafts and eating artificial cod. A future that we were once promised.

Nicola cast me aside for a teacher called Nigel and I couldn’t believe it at the time, I thought it was all going so well between us, we’d been dating for about six months, maybe more, I’d shaken hands with her father, he’d even gripped my elbow when we did, we’d bonded. She said, that though she had grown very fond of me, like a re-homed dog I suppose, she couldn’t picture us together in the future in any positive way; just that, nothing else, she was probably sparing my feelings and it was really something much worse. However, I happened to meet Nigel a few weeks later and was relieved to discover that he was a great bloke, funny, gregarious, generous, tall, square-jawed and most importantly not a dribbling hunchbacked blogger. She looked so right clinging like long-lashed moss to his chequered sleeve, laughing too readily and really hardly sneering at all at the girl I was with. I would have left me for him as well if I wasn’t me. Nicola was exceptionally brunette and lovable, but she’d seen our future and it wasn’t to be.

 
The Stanley 140 can also, of course, be used as an ordinary block plane and the slicing action works very well on end-grain, the one I bought, probably unwisely, has the early and very inferior adjustment lever, I expect that's what Nicola saw coming and just couldn‘t face the stigma.