My Favorite Hand Plane

As far as we know now, the story begins in Roman times. The Romans themselves said the plane was invented by the Greeks, but so far no Greek planes have been found. W.L. Goodman, “The Story of the Plane”. My favorite plane is a Lie-Nielsen (L-N) No.62 low angle jack plane that I purchased from L-N earlier this year. I bought it because I was tired of fighting tough wood - e.g., wenge, ebony, ziricote - with a vintage Stanley No.5 jack plane set up with a toothing iron and that got swapped out for smoothing iron to finish the work. I ordered the No.62 with two extra irons - a toothing iron and a regular iron. The toothing iron makes short work of reducing wood down to desired thicknesses, the other iron got a 35 degree angle on it, which, if sharpened it well enough, will produce a glassy smooth finish. It took a while to make the decision to purchase this plane, the price of the plane and extra irons was a bit of an issue, but after I saw that most used L-N tools sell for the same