Hand Planes Explained: Choosing Your First Three

The first time someone hands you a bench plane and it takes a shaving so thin you can read newsprint through it, you understand why people get obsessive about these tools. But the numbering system is baffling from the outside, the catalogues push a dozen options, and it is genuinely hard to know where a real beginner should start. Here is how I would spend a modest budget if I were building a kit from scratch today.

Why the numbers are so confusing#

Bench planes have been sold by number since the Stanley catalogue standardised them well over a century ago, and nearly every maker since has copied the scheme. The problem is that the numbers describe length, not job. A No. 4 is roughly 9 inches long, a No. 5 about 14, a No. 7 around 22. As the number goes up, the plane gets longer and heavier.

Length matters because a longer sole bridges over the hollows in a board and only cuts the high spots, which is exactly what you want when you are trying to make an edge dead straight. A short plane, by contrast, dips into every low spot and follows the surface it is given, so it can smooth but it cannot straighten. That single idea, long-planes-straighten and short-planes-smooth, unlocks the whole system.

There is also a set of half-sizes (No. 4½, No. 5½) that are simply wider and heavier versions of the standard plane. Ignore those for now. They are refinements you can appreciate once you know what you are doing, not decisions a first-time buyer needs to agonise over.

The three planes I would actually buy#

If you only ever own three bench planes, own these:

1. A jack plane (No. 5) for the rough and middle work
2. A smoother (No. 4) for final surfaces
3. A jointer (No. 7, or a No. 6 if funds are tight) for straightening edges and flattening boards

Those three cover the full arc of preparing a rough board into a finished panel: hog off the worst, refine it flat and straight, then leave a surface ready for finish. Everything else, block planes, shoulder planes, rebate planes, is a specialist you add when a specific job demands it.

Start with the jack if you buy only one#

The No. 5 jack is the plane I tell everyone to buy first, and if budget forces you to buy a single plane and live with it for a while, make it this one. It is called a jack because it is the jack-of-all-trades. At 14 inches it is long enough to do a passable job of straightening a shorter edge, short enough to smooth a surface if you set it fine, and heavy enough to remove material in a hurry when you open the mouth and camber the blade.

In practice a jack does three different jobs depending on how you set it up:

• Set coarse, with a curved (cambered) edge on the blade and the cap iron backed off, it becomes a fast stock-removal tool that turns a rough sawn board into something close to flat.
• Set medium, with a gentler camber, it does the tidying-up passes.
• Set fine, with a nearly straight edge, it will smooth well enough that a beginner may not immediately feel the need for a dedicated smoother.

The honest trade-off is that a jack does none of those three jobs as well as the specialist plane built for it. But it does all of them competently, and that flexibility is worth more than perfection when you are starting out and learning what your hands actually want.

Add a smoother for the surface that shows#

The No. 4 smoother is the plane that leaves the finished face. It is short, so it follows the board rather than fighting it, and it is light enough to control for the delicate final passes where you are removing shavings measured in thousandths of an inch. This is the plane that produces that glassy, faintly reflective surface that no sandpaper can match, because a keen edge slices the wood fibres cleanly instead of tearing and scratching them.

A well-tuned smoother also, in my experience, changes how you feel about sanding. Once you can take a board straight off a smoother to finish, you start reaching for sandpaper less and the shop gets a lot quieter and less dusty. That alone sells a lot of people on hand planes.

Add a jointer for straight edges and flat panels#

The No. 7 jointer is the long one, and it does the one thing the other two genuinely cannot: it makes edges truly straight so boards can be glued edge-to-edge into a wide panel with no gaps. Its length is the whole point. Ride it along an edge and it planes down only the high spots, pass after pass, until the entire length is coplanar.

The caveat is size and weight. A full No. 7 is a big lump of iron, and if you are small-framed or working on shorter stock, a No. 6 fore plane is a very reasonable compromise, splitting the difference between a jack and a jointer. I would rather see a beginner comfortable and confident with a No. 6 than wrestling a No. 7 they find exhausting. You can always graduate up later.

New or vintage?#

This is the decision that trips people up most, so I will be direct about it.

A restored vintage plane usually beats a cheap new one. The used market is full of old Stanley and Record bench planes from the era when they were everyday tools, and the castings, irons and mechanisms on those are often better than anything sold cheaply today. You can find them at car boot sales, tool auctions and online for a fraction of a premium new plane, and bringing one back to working order is a genuinely satisfying weekend project.

What to look for on a vintage plane:

• A flat sole with no cracks, especially around the mouth and the thin areas near the handle. Surface rust cleans off; a cracked casting does not.
• A complete, adjustable mechanism where the depth wheel and lateral lever both move without seizing.
• An iron with plenty of length left on it, not one ground down to a stub.
• No pitting on the back of the iron near the cutting edge, because a pitted edge will not take a keen sharpening.

The other end of the market is the premium new maker, and those planes are superb, essentially ready to work out of the box aside from honing. If you have the budget and no interest in restoration, they are a legitimate shortcut and you will not be disappointed. What I would steer you away from is the cheapest tier of new hardware-store planes, which typically arrive with rough soles, poorly bedded irons and blunt edges, and which need as much fettling as an old plane without the quality underneath.

No plane works out of the box#

Here is the caveat that catches out every beginner, and it is the most important thing on this page: whatever you buy, it will not perform until you sharpen and tune it. A plane is only ever as good as the edge on its iron. Straight from the shop, even a good new plane has a factory grind that is nowhere near sharp enough for fine work, and a vintage one needs its edge restored entirely.

At minimum, budget for:

• A sharpening setup, whether that is waterstones, diamond plates or a scary-sharp arrangement of abrasive paper on glass. You do not need the expensive option, but you do need something, and you need to learn to use it.
• A honing guide, if you are new, because holding a repeatable angle freehand takes practice you do not yet have.
• Time to flatten the back of the iron and, on a vintage plane, to check the sole and set the cap iron correctly.

I would genuinely rather see someone own one properly sharpened plane than three dull ones. A sharp, well-set jack will delight you. Three blunt planes will convince you that hand tools are a fraud, and that would be a shame, because the problem was never the tools.

A sensible order to buy in#

If the budget cannot stretch to all three at once, buy them in this order and add as you go:

1. The jack (No. 5) first, because it does the most.
2. The smoother (No. 4) second, once you want better finished surfaces than the jack gives.
3. The jointer (No. 7 or No. 6) third, when you start gluing up panels and need genuinely straight edges.

Spread over a few months, this lets you learn each plane properly before adding the next, and it spreads the cost of the sharpening kit and the learning curve across the whole set.

The bottom line#

Three planes will carry you a very long way: a jack for the heavy lifting, a smoother for the surface that shows, and a jointer for edges and flattening. Buy good vintage where you can, avoid the bargain-bin new stuff, and spend as much attention on sharpening as you do on the planes themselves. Get that right and you will wonder how you ever managed without them.