Dr.Al
Old Oak
As I'm sure some of you know, I maintain a website. The website contains write-ups of many of the projects I've done, along with some calculators to help work stuff out and various pages of data on things like threads. When I originally made the website (back in 2011), I did it for two reasons. The projects write-ups were there because I thought it would do me good to get in the habit of writing about making stuff (and to give me an easy way to look back on projects I'd done in the past). The calculators and data pages were there because I was fed up with searching for stuff on-line and having to filter through lots of American resources where the authors had never heard of the millimetre. Having it all on my website meant that it was easy for me to find the information when I needed it.
In the very early days of the website, it got hardly any "traffic" and as a result, was completely free to run. Over the years it has got more and more popular and after a while I started getting bills from the hosting provider. As those bills increased, I wanted to try to offset them a bit, but I hate adverts on websites. As an alternative, I rather optimistically put this simple notice quite unobtrusively (in my opinion) at the bottom of each page:
For the first year or two, not much came of that, which didn't surprise me at all. However, after a while I started to get occasional donations (along with more frequent messages telling me that they liked the website, which I always appreciated getting and always made a point of replying to). Those donations went into a paypal account, which was also used to pay for the website hosting. Unsurprisingly, I kept having to add a bit to the paypal balance to cover the hosting costs.
About four or five years ago, those donations became frequent enough that I was hardly ever having to top up the paypal balance. It has been a while since I've even logged into the paypal account, but I checked a few days ago and the balance surprised me. Now it's not like I'm going to be able to use it for an early retirement, but there was a few hundred pounds in there.
I mentioned this to my other half and she immediately said "you should use it to buy something special for the workshop, you know the sort of thing you wouldn't be able to justify normally but you'd really like to have". Sometimes when your other half suggests you do something, it's best to just get on and do it!
This is definitely not a tool I needed. I already have three #4s (which cost me about £15 each), a #4½ (which I think was about £20) and two #5s (an Axminster one that was my first ever plane and a Stanley that cost me about £20). This cost substantially more than all of those put together but it really is a thing of beauty:
I think you'd call it "reassuringly" heavy. It weighs 2.9 kg, which puts it somewhere in between my Stanley #6 and #7. I don't think I'll be using it for rough work (for that I sometimes find the #5 a bit heavy and switch to wooden planes), but I think it'll be lovely as a smoothing plane. So thank you, kind strangers, for donating to the website and funding my tool habit!
It felt like the sort of thing that deserved a place on the tool wall, so the rebate plane got moved into a gap higher up so the Clifton can sit next to my low-angle smoother:
In the very early days of the website, it got hardly any "traffic" and as a result, was completely free to run. Over the years it has got more and more popular and after a while I started getting bills from the hosting provider. As those bills increased, I wanted to try to offset them a bit, but I hate adverts on websites. As an alternative, I rather optimistically put this simple notice quite unobtrusively (in my opinion) at the bottom of each page:
For the first year or two, not much came of that, which didn't surprise me at all. However, after a while I started to get occasional donations (along with more frequent messages telling me that they liked the website, which I always appreciated getting and always made a point of replying to). Those donations went into a paypal account, which was also used to pay for the website hosting. Unsurprisingly, I kept having to add a bit to the paypal balance to cover the hosting costs.
About four or five years ago, those donations became frequent enough that I was hardly ever having to top up the paypal balance. It has been a while since I've even logged into the paypal account, but I checked a few days ago and the balance surprised me. Now it's not like I'm going to be able to use it for an early retirement, but there was a few hundred pounds in there.
I mentioned this to my other half and she immediately said "you should use it to buy something special for the workshop, you know the sort of thing you wouldn't be able to justify normally but you'd really like to have". Sometimes when your other half suggests you do something, it's best to just get on and do it!
This is definitely not a tool I needed. I already have three #4s (which cost me about £15 each), a #4½ (which I think was about £20) and two #5s (an Axminster one that was my first ever plane and a Stanley that cost me about £20). This cost substantially more than all of those put together but it really is a thing of beauty:
I think you'd call it "reassuringly" heavy. It weighs 2.9 kg, which puts it somewhere in between my Stanley #6 and #7. I don't think I'll be using it for rough work (for that I sometimes find the #5 a bit heavy and switch to wooden planes), but I think it'll be lovely as a smoothing plane. So thank you, kind strangers, for donating to the website and funding my tool habit!
It felt like the sort of thing that deserved a place on the tool wall, so the rebate plane got moved into a gap higher up so the Clifton can sit next to my low-angle smoother:
Anyway the other half is always right as most of us know. 
I mean, you should have spent the money on wood, but as a second-best.........
