• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Guy's Handtools Ltd

Mike G

Mike G

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What do we know? I've never heard of them, but in a job lot box of planes I picked up last year some time, I found this little block plane:

0UpRa8V.png

f50abDz.png

I believe it was a Frankenplane*, but it is even more so now as the nasty little locking wheel snapped off as soon as I moved it. I grabbed a nice little cap from another broken plane, and it fitted better than the orange one it came with. After cleaning up this is a perfectly decent little plane.......but I would like to know a little about it.

kagu2KI.png

* Turns out it wasn't. Ther are a number of photos of this plane on the internet, and they all show the orange cap. The wheel was very poor quality, and the cap didn't fit properly. The rest of the plane is fine.
 
Goodman's British Planemakers just gives dates of circa 1952 to 1971, and the same address as this ad from the Hardware Trade Journal's Key Lists of Tools:

guys.png

I can add this photo of my junior hacksaw, bought some time in the early 1970s - and still a cut above many other models:

IMG_20230212_160932016.jpg
 
Thanks Andy. That's later than I expected, and not where I expected.
 
There's a little bit more info here
https://progress-is-fine.blogspot.com/2 ... tools.html
including comments that some of their wares were sold in Woolworths or in the Green Shield Stamps catalogue.

Companies House records seem to give a start date of 1944 and a name change in 1983, so they were a bit longer lived than previously stated.

That design of a cheap-to-make block plane seems to have been widely used - I know my Dad had a very similar one.
 
Interesting comment from someone who worked there in 1968 that they made everything themsleves. This wasn't just an importer, or distributor, but a manufacturer.
 
that fits a saying here, that's now politically incorrect, I guess.

My friends, dad, whoever - if someone wore something or bought something and you wanted to have a go at them (in good fun). "that's a nice new tool you got there. if they make a guy's version, I might want to get one"

(could be anything car, tools, shoes, whatever).

to whip that out "yeah, this one is guys". I'd have bought it just to be able to do that.
 
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