CSP4 Carpenters No.4 Smoothing Plane

A quality tool that's a pleasure to use.

This is a barely viable plane straight out of the box. I've struggled with it for 2 days and gone through a lot of troubleshooting to improve it. Few points in order of severity: 1) The blade has an edge but you'll need to sharpen it (even 240 grit sandpaper gives a huge improvement)! The blade is really hard and you won't need to sharpen it after every use. 2) Parts (see frog in pictures) were assembled with blobs of paint between roughly flat surfaces. Remove the paint (and worst of grinding marks) and the frog/blade will sit more square. 3) The sintered metal parts (esp. frog and clamp) are have quite a few voids and my frog wasn't sitting flush with the sole due to a large burr). Fortunately the metal is very soft so it's easy to sand them back. 4) The sole is a little concave but it's good enough not to worry about. After spending 1-2 hours touching it up and tightening everything, it works really well. Check out Matt Eastleas YouTube video 'i made a £38 plane perform like a £338 plane' for details on refinishing a plane. You may find an old one (with better quality/longer lasting parts) at auction but you'll likely have to spend a lot longer refinishing it!

Used and owned various planes in the past, both as a professional and DIY. Used this to plane some doors which were not fitting properly. It allowed me to get the doors to fit and look correct. Extremely sharp blade, which makes light work of the job. Well constructed and easy to adjust the blade. To remove the blade for cleaning and sharpening, all that's required is a flat head screwdriver. Would recommend that you clean and dry if used outside, as being constructed from steel, it would rust up if left wet. Yes well worth the price, and definitely recommended

I already have a T5 a no41/2 and a number 4 as well as a selection of block planes but I rather fancied a no3 just to make the set, and as Rex Krugar said ' I have enough wood planes said no woodworker ever'. So I saw this one while browsing through the tools and thought £13.99 it's got to be worth a try, although at the cost I was not really that hopeful. But I have never brought a brand new plane before so the was a certain amount of expectation attached to it. The plane arrived in a small box well greased and in a bag. I cleaned off the grease with wd40 and had my first pass I was using a 2' 2"×2" length of pine par as my test piece, unsurprisingly it totally failed to give me a shaving but I had been expecting that result, so I was not disappointed 😅. My first step was to remove the cap and blade. The cap has a screw not a leaver but serves the same purpose and is at least on this size plane a good idea, it did need a bit of a swipe on the coarse and medium stones as the was some bubbling in the chrome plating but it was literally 1 minutes work to sort out. The blade required a full resharpaning useing a coarse diamond stone(160g) a medium stone (300g) and a fine whetstone (2500g) with a quick strop on a leather pad. The steel is nice and hard I have high hopes for it's ability to keep it's edge. If you don't have stones it easy enough to use wet'n'dry or even ordinary sandpaper just work your way through the grits, the whole sorting out the blade took about 25 minutes but that did include drinking a cup of coffee at the same time. The chip breaker was perfect so apart from degreasing no attention required. The sole was fairly well ground but when I gave it a scribble on with magic marker and a swipe or two across some sandpaper it became obvious that some love was going to be needed a slight hollow behind the mouth and at the heel also the right hand side was slightly out. But useing a medium grit sandpaper glued to a piece of plywood and some elbow grease it took me 10 minutes to get it square and level with a good polished finish. The tote(handle) was perfectly acceptable for me having polished the base I decided that I was happy with it's shape and feel the same thing with the front knob. I reassembled the plane and gave it another pass on my length of 2"×2" £13.99 and just over half an hour and I have a what appears to be rather decent bit of kit,it's definitely early days but I suspect that it's going to last me out. And it took less time to set up than my no5 about two hours less, How they can present this product for the ridiculous price I really can't understand but if you are in the market for a no3 get one give it a little bit of a fettle and start using it.

I haven’t used a plane for years but getting a new Stanley plane brought it all back. Once set up it performed perfectly. Door trimmed and it now fits perfectly. Great value and still as good as it ever was.

On receipt, it was clear that the plane was unusable without some work. The general impression was 'cheap import' and the Spear & Jackson logo was only in the form of transfers applied to the sides the sides (which wore off rapidly). The blade seemed very thin (at 1.9 mm) and the blade edge had nicks along it. I notice that a 'spare or replacement' blade is advertised by Spear & Jackson for the same model on Amazon as being 0.5 mm thick. An initial trial with a piece of pine showed the surface planed but with lines along it where the nicks were on the iron edge. Putting a straight edge along the full length of the sole showed significant light coming through in the middle. Probably a gap at the centre of more than 1 mm. Checking the cross section of the sole at various points showed that it was convex at some points and concave at others. There were no instructions with the plane in the box which would be a problem for a newcomer. I did very significant flattening of the sole, cleaned the paint from the frog and sharpened the blade. The blade would not take an edge - it kept crumbling on the edge when sharpened at 25 degrees. It was better with a secondary bevel of 30 degrees (and a microbevel on the flat side). Having done that, it seems to be a workable plane if the iron will hold the edge. I suspect it will need a new blade but will give this one a try fist. I have hopes that it will be a useful addition to the toolset .

Well made. Does what it is supposed to do. Instructions state sharpen blade before use. If the blade was sharp on arrival it would have been 5 stars.

I've seen a few reviews complaining about the sharpness of this plane and so I thought I'd offer my opinion on it. It's a nice little plane, fully functional, acceptable quality, and .................blunt. So what. Every bladed tool you will buy will need sharpening before use. It took me all of 90 seconds to sharpen, and another couple of minutes setting the plane. Now I have a very nice piece of kit that didn't cost the world. But a word of advice. If you're going to buy one, you have to invest in some diamond plates and a leather strop. You not only need these for initial set up, but also to keep the iron sharp going forward. Hope this helps.

Está muy bien. Si ocupa preparación previa, pero no es muy complicado. A pesar de ser un poco más barato que un Stanley, me ha servido de maravilla a mí como principiante.

Item arrived broken

Not used yet, but quality seems to be very good. It will be very usefull in the future.

Works very well, specially at this price. Shaving very thin cuts once set up and sharpened. Its made me fall in love with hand planers.

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