At some point in 2020 I decided I need a (modern) rabbet plane. Of course, I have a couple vintage wood ones that I used from time to time. But, I wanted a modern one with a modern blade adjustment. Tappity tap tap fussing is fine for fooling around, but unless you are manually adjusting the wooden planes all the time, it’s a PITA to get just right. And as much as I’d like to be spending that level of time in the shop, it’s not going to happen for at least 5 or 8 years yet.
Looking around, the Veritas Skew Rabbet Plane looked like just the thing.
I’ve been taken with the Veritas planes in recent years for several reasons: good price/feature value, availability and a Norris style adjuster. I’ve grown to prefer that over the Bailey style adjuster popularized on the Stanley planes and their many, many clones. It’s more precise and lower profile. I already have a Veritas Custom No. 4 Smooth Plane, a Veritas Custom No. 5 Jack Plane, and a Veritas Low Angle Jack Plane (a bevel up plane, similar to Stanley No. 62), so one of these would fit right in to my collection.
Options
Why not just snag a Stanley No. 78 from the shelf? Ugh. Well, first of all, these have become much sought after. I don’t know why. When I started reselling tools, we’d get maybe $25 or $30 for one, if it was complete (they are often missing the depth stop and/or fence). It was more profitable to part them out, though I rarely do that. Now a days, they are going for $80 to $150 complete, even more NIB. Crazy. Stanley made millions of these things. They are not in any way uncommon. Despite the sudden surge of interest, I still end up with several a year in auctions and happily resell them.
By and large, they kind of suck though. Sure, they are serviceable, and for a plane you aren’t going to use very much, one of those would probably be okay. Quick list of short comings: sloppy blade depth adjustment, a bull-nose feature that needlessly complicates the plane for which I have never seen a use case, a square (rather than skew blade), a barely adequate fence.
Other options include the Stanley 180-181-182 series of rabbet planes (old and somewhat rare), the Stanley No. 192 Rabbet Plane (a 180 plane with a nicker). Neither of these comes with a fence. So you would have to use the same technique with them as the wooden ones: clamp a board to the work as a guide. Or, as some of these I have come across, bolt a fence tot he sole. Shudder.
Stanley also made a skew version, the No. 289. This is rare as hen’s teeth. In over 10 years of tool sales, I have had exactly zero of them versus over a hundred of the 78/180/190 models. So, if I could source one, I’d have to pay collector prices for it (currently $250-$380). At that point, let’s buy a new made plane. One for which you can get parts, like a blade.
Enter the Veritas Skew Rabbet. Retail price (Jan 2022) of $279 with the PM-V11 blade. You can see the family resemblance on the Veritas model to the Stanley planes. The basic form factor is the same and is fine. Veritas omits the bull-nose option, a plus in my view.
The iron is bedded at a 30 deg skew. What’s the value there? The skewed blade tends to pull the plane into the cut making it easier to to keep the fence tight on the reference edge. Not critical, sure, but if you can have it, why wouldn’t you? The down side is that it’s a bit more of a PITA to sharpen. However, this is a special use plane, so it’s not something you are going to do very often. And, of course, there’s a jig for that.
To be fair, there is a down side: the plane is now “handed”, you can only go one direction. On the straight planes, the fence and depth stop can be swapped to the other side and you can plane left to right instead of right to left. With a skewed blade, that’s doesn’t work, the blade wants to push the plane out of the cut. So, if cutting “left handed” is important to you, you need two planes.
Yes this comes on a left handed version. And yes, I have one. But, no, I have never (yet) needed it. To be honest, I didn’t set out to buy a left handed one. I scored it at an auction thinking it was a right handed plane and all happy with myself that even with buyer’s premium I had saved quite a bit off retail for an essentially unused plane. Then, after I got it home, discovered it was backwards. Dammit. After fees, I wasn’t going to do much more than recover my spend on it, so I kept it. It would have been particularly galling to sell it and then later find I needed a left handed version for something and have to replace it at retail prices.
What You Get
If you’ve purchased a Veritas plane before, you know what you are getting. They may start with the traditional Stanley plane as a basis, but then they spend a lot of time refining the user experience and controls to make a much more usable modern version. It’s the same with this plane. The fit and finish is excellent. No rough edges or poorly machined parts. The sole is dead flat as is the fence. The iron is ready to go right out of the box. No, it really is.
Usage
As you can tell from the photo above (plundered from their website (this constitutes fair use under copyright law BTW), it’s got a lot of controls: knobs, screws, etc. So it takes a few minutes to learn the ins and outs of the plane. Of course there are instructions. I am sure I saved them…somewhere. Obviously, I didn’t read them. So it took me several minutes to figure out how to deploy the nicker for the cross-grain cuts.
Unlike the Stanley planes, the Veritas has several set screws that you can use to freeze the iron in place. This makes it possible to replace the iron in exactly the same position after you remove it for sharpening. A nice touch. Getting the cut just right is a little fussy, but not something you have to screw with once set. Unless you take the blade out, for example.
The one downside so far, and I only have about 30 minutes of playing with it at this point, is the fence. It’s way better than the one on the Stanley planes, but it drifted badly on my on the first cut. You really have to crank it down to be sure it won’t move on you. Luckily, it mattered not at all for this board as the rabbet is on the bottom of the seat. But it’s something I will be careful of in the future. It also makes means the one on the Stanley planes must suck worse than I imaged.
