Affiliate Disclosure

The short version

Plane & Patina is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. When you buy something after clicking a link here, we earn a commission from Amazon. You pay exactly the same price you would have paid anyway.

That is the only way this site makes money. There are no sponsored placements, no paid reviews, no display advertising, and no free products — we do not accept products, which is straightforward, because we do not test them.

How the links work

Every commercial link on this site is marked rel="sponsored nofollow" and routes through /go/, our own redirect. That redirect does three things: appends our Amazon Associates tag (t5woodwork-20), records the click in our analytics so we can see which pages are useful, and checks that the destination actually belongs to the merchant it claims to. Then it sends you to Amazon.

Buy CTAs also carry a visible #admarker next to them, on every surface where one appears — comparison tables, product cards, hub tiles and homepage cards alike. A disclosure only on this page would not satisfy the FTC's “clear and conspicuous” standard, and it would not be much use to you either.

Commission does not decide rankings

This is easy to claim and hard to prove, so here is the evidence rather than the claim.

The two best bench planes available new in North America are made by Lie-Nielsen and Veritas. Neither sells through Amazon; both sell direct. We earn nothing on either. They are named as the right answer on the main plane roundup, compared in detail on Veritas vs Lie-Nielsen, and linked with a plain note saying we make no money from the click.

The same applies wherever it comes up. When a cheaper product is the better buy we say so, and when the honest recommendation is “buy a used one instead” — which is the recommendation on vintage versus new planes— we make that recommendation, and earn nothing from it.

Prices

Every price shown here comes from the Amazon Product API and is date-stamped (currently Jul 24, 2026). Prices change constantly and the one on Amazon at the moment you check out is the one that counts.

If our price data is more than 48 hours old, the number disappears rather than going stale: the button falls back to “Check price on Amazon”, and the cost-per-decade figure derived from that price is suppressed too. This is deliberate and non-negotiable. There is no price field anywhere in this site's content files, so it is structurally impossible for a page here to render a remembered number.

Other programs

At the time of writing, Amazon is the only affiliate program this site participates in.Where we link to a manufacturer or a specialist retailer — Lie-Nielsen, Lee Valley, Woodcraft — those are plain, untracked links and we earn nothing from them. Any link that could pay us is marked #ad; if it is not marked, it does not pay us.

If that changes, this page changes with it, on the same day. We will not add a tracked program quietly.

What we will never do

• Rank a product higher because it pays more.
• Omit a better product because it pays nothing.
• Invent a price, a rating, a review count, a test result or an award.
• Publish a testimonial. There are no customers here to quote.
• Claim to have tested, owned or handled a tool we have not.
• Accept a free product, a sponsored placement, or payment for a review.

Questions

If any of this is unclear, or you think a link is mislabeled, email info@planeandpatina.com or use the contact form. See also the editorial policy and the methodology.