Handy Tools – Scrub Plane made from a Stanley Global #3
Found a guy on eBay who was selling a bunch of maroon #3 Stanley “Global” planes for $37.50 each. They were $31 in early 2019 when I bought one to try it out. At the time, I flattened the sole, decided it was a cheap plane and if I wanted to improve it, I'd probably need to buy a Hock plane blade at minimum. (Note: I later did this with another of the #3s I bought, and with the Hock blade, it's a decent performer, but still not great)
Today I decided I was going to repurpose it as a scrub plane. I pulled the blade and walked over to the grinder. I freehand ground something between a 4” and 6” radius on the end of the blade. Between ten or fifteen minutes elapsed. It's not exactly circular, maybe more parabolic from the look of it. Then I spent ten or fifteen minutes sharpening the blade on my coarse sharpening stone and called it good.
I adjusted the frog back a little to open up the mouth on the plane, and popped the blade back in the plane. Took it to the fir 6×6 I'm turning into a post for my post drill, and it does a pretty good job. For a shaving between ½ and ⅝ inch (yes, I'm only using between a half and a third of the blade, but it's easy work this way), it's around 1/16 thick, which is how I have my other scrub plane adjusted. It's small enough that I can take off shavings like that for almost an hour before I need to take a break, and on the post, that translated to knocking one of the corners of the post down by ¼ inch, tapering to nothing at the other end of the 8' long 6×6.
Not bad for about $30 and less than an hour's time. And a lot cheaper than buying a Lie-Nielsen 40½ scrub plane for $175. Well, unless my time is worth more than $140/hour.
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