About Plane & Patina

Who

Plane & Patina is written by Stephen V., an enthusiast who is genuinely into this. I read the manuals, compile the published specifications, and do the math. I have not handled every tool on this site, and I will tell you which ones on every page. No lab coat.

That is the whole biography, and its brevity is the point. There is no shop behind this site, no workshop, no staff, no editorial board, and no credential. Publishing an inflated version of any of those would be the easiest thing in the world and the first thing a reader could falsify.

What the site is

A reference for people buying hand planes, chisels, saws and sharpening equipment who hate rebuying things. The organizing question is narrow: is paying four times as much once actually cheaper than replacing something repeatedly? It turns out that question is answerable from public documents, and almost nobody answers it.

Across the competitor pages we read while researching this site, not one publishes cost-of-ownership arithmetic, a warranty comparison, or an assessment of whether spare parts can genuinely be bought. Those are the three inputs a durability-focused buyer actually needs, and all three are published documents anyone can check. So that is what this site does. The full procedure is on the methodology page.

What the site is not

We have not tested these tools.Nobody here has used one, owned one, or taken one apart. Everything on this site is compiled from published specifications, the manufacturers' own manuals, and warranty and parts documentation — all cited, all linked, all checkable.

That is worth saying plainly because the field does not. Three of the five ranking affiliate roundups we read claim or imply hands-on testing without publishing a procedure, a named reviewer, or a single photograph of a tool in use. One of them states outright that it reviewed seven planes online. A reader comparing those pages has no way to tell the real testing from the imaginary, because everyone uses the same vocabulary.

We are not going to add to that. The honest position is that a compilation is a compilation, and a compilation done carefully and cited fully is genuinely useful — more useful, for a durability question, than a weekend of shavings would be.

What is genuinely first-hand here

Four things, and they are real work:

• The compilation. Assembling warranty terms across a dozen makers into one table is original work that nobody else in this category has published.
• The arithmetic. The cost-per-decade figures are ours: computed, and disclosed with their assumptions.
• The gaps we found.That Stanley's lifetime warranty excludes “any blade”, that Starrett warrants for one year rather than a lifetime, that Lee Valley publish a returns policy rather than a defect warranty — those are first-hand observations from documents, dated and sourced.
• Documentary research on vintage tooling. Type studies, date ranges, identification. Verifiable from published references.

How it pays for itself

Affiliate commission from Amazon, and nothing else. No sponsored placements, no paid reviews, no free products — we do not accept products, which is easy because we do not test them.

Commission never decides a ranking. The clearest evidence of that is on the pages: the best bench planes available in North America are made by Lie-Nielsen and Veritas, both of which sell direct and pay us nothing, and both are named as the right answer with links, plainly marked as non-earning. Full terms on the affiliate disclosure page.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it in place with a dated note. Email info@planeandpatina.com, or use the contact form. Specs change, warranties get revised, and products get discontinued; a page that is never corrected is not a page that was right. How corrections are handled is set out in the editorial policy.

Published by

Plane & Patina is published by Type 5 Marketing LLC. There is no physical address or phone number on this site because there is no premises and no phone line, and inventing either to look established is the same class of thing as inventing a test lab.