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.

For the price its fantastic I paid $21.76 including tax and shipping! I have been experimenting with these modern hand planes from India under various names Grizzly, Draper and Spear & Jackson. I think there is a larger degree of variability with many of these planes from India, some are better machined and made and require a little less work. This plane by S & J was one such plane? It required the least amount of work out the 3 recent planes I have gotten. They all require flattening the sole and this was no exception just that it was closer to flat to start with. The blade and chipbreaker weren't bad either and was able to flatten and sharpen them in short order. I did not check the side squareness to sole since I had not planned on using it on a shooting board. The handles were nicely finished a bit more like the handles from Grizzly they were nicely shaped and finished with only like light oil or wax finish which is the way I prefer them, you can actually feel the wood this way. I had to fuss with the plane a little to get the blade and mouth adjusted properly but then it would take nice shavings, I may convert the plane into a scrub plane with a convex sharpening of blade? Overall very worthwhile plane! and I might look and see about ordering other sizes of S&J?

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.

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. 😫

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.

You see, I don't know much about planes so I didn't want to spend a fortune. After research on what a really good plane is I opted for this because of its price and features. If weight is any indication, this is heavy. Brass and iron fittings. Wooden (real) handles. The first thing I did was take it apart and examine each piece. The blade might be a little thin but I have nothing to compare. All the knobs and threads work as they should. If you're going to buy one (any plane) learn HOW they work before purchase. You will have to sharpen and flatten the shoe on any new plane so study how to do that. Once you get the parts, you'll do fine. They ought to sell this in a kit with a sharpening stone and a selection of sand paper but I already had those. Even if you didn't use this it'd look great on the shelf!

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.

Overall, this might be good to learn to fettle a plane or if you already know how. A true beginner might be very frustrated with this tool. For the price, it is a good value as long as you know what you are getting into. I have to commend S&J for making a number 3 at this price, and compared to any other source of number 3 planes, this is a tremendous deal. After many months, still there it is at a great price, it is a great thing that S&J even offer it. But there were some quality control issues that could trip up a beginner. The casting was dead flat on the sole and perfectly square on both sides. This was excellent. It is a thick casting that feels very solid. The chip breaker is on the cheap side, just a slab of metal, but not too bad and doesn't need to be fancy to work. The blade and chipbreaker were ground well enough and didn't require much to make perfectly flat. The chipbreaker did have a rounded edge I didn't like, so I spent 30 min turning that into a bevel-type edge and ensuring it was flat against the blade. After using, I think the iron quality is basically fine, no obvious issues there. The wheel mechanism is OK, better than some other cheapo models. It is smooth, but it does have some slop. The pressed metal piece that links with the blade itself to advance it was too loose against its mounting pin. So I hammered a nail to remove that cross pin from the frog, and then hammered the eyelet openings the pin runs through to smush them a bit and make the fit tighter. No more slop there. The frog is the big problem. Mine had a casting that wasn't properly milled, as the factory left a wad of iron next to the screw hole that interfered with the screw height. It raised the screw head against the blade until it made the blade ride above the frog bed! (My photo shows the location...like a blob of iron that was not milled out.) I used a drill and a thin HSS chisel to gouge that blob of iron out so that the blade would seat properly. A normal person would send it back rather than do this. There were also some small chips on the edges of the frog bed casting, but nothing that affects performance. The mouth had some extra iron near a corner that needed very careful filing out for the blade to seat properly on the mouth. The mouth is pretty open for a smoother, so I bought a thicker iron that's in the mail now. I used a hand file to go over the frog bed and other parts that needed to be flat. Overall except for the big stupid errors, the castings of the frog and body are quite good, if that makes sense...and especially compared to other planes in its class. It's as if nobody checked this one, quite strange. The handle will need some TLC to get it more comfortable. It's a nice wood and not sloppy at all but truly needs reshaping with files because some edges bit into the palm too much. After spending an afternoon getting everything as tuned as I could, I got decent 2-2.5 thou shavings and pretty good performance. I still think there's more fine tuning possible based on the results I'm getting so far. It doesn't feel as smooth as an old stanley 4, but I hope I can improve that. Overall, I'm happy to have a no 3 size for the price, and I'm treating it like a thrift store find, so I'm happy to put in work as its own project. In truth, nobody needs a number 3, so most people will regard this as a side project. For that, it is rewarding. I do wish the S&J markings were more than a light little etch on the side. But that's just me. A stamp on the iron would be a nice touch, for instance. A proper chipbreaker would also be fitting. Edit: Months later it is working flawless, the blade has held up well, I get full width shavings and it is really nice to use. The number 3 size is thinner and lighter than most similar smoothers, so I like to have it nearby. Also I see I am listed as Vine Voice. I just joined this week and bought this plane months ago with my own money. Just FYI.