Spear & Jackson CSP4 No. 4 Smoothing Plane

This is an excellent tool considering the price. (I paid a bit less than $25.) The casting is good, handles are nice, and the blade, chip breaker and cap seem to be pretty well made. Straight out of the box, it was ready to take nice shavings from a piece of red cedar I had laying around. However, the plane needed quite a bit of work to get it to perform like a proper smoothing plane. I disassembled the plane and examined the components. The casting appeared to be well made with no gross defects. The sole of the plane was more-or-less flat, but it did require about 45 minutes to flatten properly. (Working from 80 grit sandpaper to 220.) The sides were perpendicular to the sole. The casting was nicely painted, although there was a bit of paint on the seating for the frog, which I scraped off with a razor blade. As is usual for new planes, the back of the blade needed to be flattened before sharpening. That took about 15 minutes, and sharpening the blade took about 5 more. I put the plane together, adjusted the frog, and made test cuts. Some debris was accumulating between the blade and the chip breaker, indicating a poor fit between the two. I flattened the end of the chip breaker on a stone so that it fit the blade correctly. That took about 10 minutes. Total time required to properly set this up as a smoothing plane was about 1 hr 15 minutes. After setting up the plane, it did indeed perform like a proper smoothing plane. On figured maple, the plane removed very fine shavings and left a glass-like surface. At this point, I am very happy with the plane and consider it to be a bargain despite the work needed for tune up. Thus my 5 star rating. My only real only real complaint is the excessive backlash on the wheel that adjusts the blade depth, but I expect that with an inexpensive plane and can live with it.

Good plane. After some honing of blade works well. Rare size, not many manufacturers produce No 3. For this price it is steal.

If you are a beginner, and have the need for #4 then this plane is for you. Know this, I have a Stanley #62 low angle plane and a Wood River #5 1/2. Any new hand plane takes some prep. This plane is no exception. The one major thing that **ANY** plane must have is an absolute flat sole. My Stanley and Wood River planes were perfectly flat. That is the one area this plane fails at. Fortunately it's not so far out that it's not correctable. It will take an hour or so smoothing on a flat surface to get it close enough were it's good enough. The Good: 1. Price, Keep in mind that you get what you pay for. 2. The lever cap prep took about 25 minutes 3. The Chip breaker took only about 5 minutes of prep time and was pretty much flat. 4. The blade was straight and flat. It took about 20 minutes to have it very sharp. The Bad: 1. The sole is going to take some time to get prepped. 2. The blade is very thin, too thin really. If their blade was .030 thicker I would buy a dozen of these. 3. The frog I is not machined as good as it could be. I did flatten it as best I could. 4. I'm not a fan of this style lever cap. But it's functional. All said it's a really good value. I was able to get it taking .001 shavings within an hour. A thicker blade and a more traditional lever cap along with a better sole surface grind at the factory would make this plane a strong competitor to some planes that are literally 10X the price. If you are a beginner, I can not stress enough the prep stage of **ANY** plane. Do a YouTube search for a video called 32 seconds to sharp. I won't mention his name here, but the person teaching this is giving you a master class in hand planes and how and why they operate. Know this, a properly sharpened and prepared hand plane makes your wood prep so smooth there isn't a grade of sandpaper that can make it smoother. I make cutting boards and picture frames out of hardwood. I don't use sandpaper. That is the kind of precision a properly tuned hand plane can get you. Once the prep is done all you ever have to do after is sharpen your blade. The rest is a 1 time thing. You do need a few other tools to achieve this. I have a diamond plate with 400 and 1000 grit, this is used to prep your sharpening stones and to do some blade prep. I have a 1000/6000 whet stone and a 12,000 grit stone. You also need a small thin 6" pocket rule. Watch the video and learn their use.

Impressed by the quality with this price! This is right out of the box result. If you tweak it would be even better.

Out of the box it is almost useless. I spent a significant amount of time getting it ready to use. It appears to be well made until you try to adjust it. The frog adjustment screw would not turn. You can see in the picture that I needed to grind a clearance groove in the frog. When it was originally assembled, tightened down the frog actually bent the adjusting screw. I was able to straighten it and it works okay now with proper clearance. The chip breaker had such a curve in it that it actually was bending the blade causing it not to sit flat on the frog. The paint on the base is so thick in places that it prevents some parts from working correctly. Again, this caused an issue with the depth screw, preventing it from going in far enough to retract the iron fully. I was able to take care of all these problems. I understand that this is an inexpensive plane but, these are manufacturing flaws that can be easily corrected. With these issues taken care of, it is now a good working tool. A beginner would struggle to use this.

I’m so angry!! This just fell off my work bench. This hand plane is amazing. I wish I could afford to replace it. It’s amazing quality. Just don’t drop it. 😫

I had to do some flattening of the sole, maybe 10 minutes,expected it to be MUCH worse than it was, for the price... The blade was not sharp enough, but again that is to be expected with any plane. Took maybe 5 minutes to flatten, and get "sharp enough", maybe another 5 or 10 minutes to get it "smoothing plane sharp". The tote (rear handle) was a bit too small for my hand to manage a proper "three finger grip" (I think I watch too many woodworking shows on YouTube) but average sized people should have no issues. I happened to have a tote that offered better clearance, as I saw no reason to send back an otherwise good, rather pleasant to use smoothing plane. Would I recommend it over a Lie Nielsen, Veritas, or similar plane? Well, that depends. If you have $400 to spend on a plane that only gets used to smooth out the chatter marks from a power surface planer (which I do not own, or desire) or after the fore plane, scrub plane and jack plane have already done the bulk of the work, well, go ahead and spend that money. As for me, I would not hesitate to buy more planes from Spear & Jackson, before committing a paycheck to those "high end" planes. Update: after further use, I still have nothing really negative to say about this plane. I believe I mentioned the tote being a problem for my large hands, which was an easy fix.

I have just started woodworking, but I feel I've put in enough effort into this plane to know that the only reason to purchase this plane is to understand what a bad plane feels like. I have achieved fairly thin (not super thin though) shavings of pine and poplar. Whisps on Maple and Walnut, and partial shavings with Oak. I do believe some of these shortcomings could be my own skill level, but I would like to warn anyone who is purchasing this plane. My reasons: 1. The blade is a travesty. I spent several hours sharpening (400->600->1000->1200) and stropping the blade. I bought honing guides to ensure I got a 25 degree primary bevel, and then 30 degree secondary bevel. The blade very nicely sliced through paper, so it is evident that it can achieve the desired sharpness. Then you see the beautiful thin shaves for a bit. Unfortunately, this sharpness stays for approximately 20 long strokes on pine (it had no serious knots). The blade then dulls, and often chips! If I am lucky, I can get away with just stropping, but if it chips, I have to get back to grinding for several tens of minutes. Note that this happens nearly every 10 minutes, so it is a huge hinderance to your workflow. 2. The depth adjustment mechanism is awful, and I didn't realize how bad it was, till I tried a 1920 vintage Stanley plane at an antique store. The collar attached to the depth adjustment wheel is pressed at the side, which creates a huge slack (10% of the range). By itself, it may not matter, as you can eat up that slack everytime. Unfortunately, for some strange reason, this slack results in blade depth hysteresis. If you start with the blade within the body (no shaving), then get increase the depth to get some shavings, and then want to reduce the depth, you can't. It invariably tears out the wood and you are back to square one. 3. The chip breaker is ever so slightly larger than the blade, meaning that you will always have a lateral shift. If you think you can correct it with the lateral shift lever, well, tough luck. The lateral shift lever has its own mind and is never consistent. Bizarrely (and I am willing to admit it could be due to my lack of skill), the adjuster needs different positions for different woods? 4. Ah the sole! I spent at least four hours flattening the sole. I don't consider it a big negative, given that it's a cheapo plane. Similarly, the plane requires sharpening but that is not a negative 5. The mouth is quite large, which may contribute to significant grain tear. You cannot reduce the mouth much, so this nearly renders this a better scrub plane than a smoothing plane. 6. The cap iron's default position causes grain tear. You need to slightly push it up and screw it down, but then this creates an unstable position. When you start, you want a reasonable tool so that you can keep honing your skills (instead of honing the blade every 10 minutes), and hence this is a poor beginner plane. In a master's hand, perhaps this tool will shine. It may even make a great scrub plane (but what about the blade dulling?). For now, my search continues.