Brands
Brand hubs
Company history, name changes and the dating quirks that come with each maker.
- 4 brands
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Millers Falls
Millers Falls spent sixty years as America's best boring-tool maker before it ever built a plane, and when it finally entered the bench plane market in 1929 it did so with castings and machining that matched Stanley at a lower price. The planes never sold in Stanley numbers, which is precisely why they are the best value in vintage American planes today.
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Record
When Stanley's British patents lapsed, the Sheffield firm of C. & J. Hampton began building Bailey-pattern planes under the Record name and kept building them long after Stanley's own quality had slipped. A 1960s Record is a better tool than a 1960s Stanley, which makes the brand the sensible choice for anyone buying a plane to work with rather than to shelve.
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Sargent
Sargent was Stanley's most serious American competitor in planes for the better part of eighty years. It built a full Bailey-pattern range, a premium self-aligning line to answer the Bedrock, and quietly manufactured the planes that hardware chains sold under their own names - so a great many tools that say Craftsman, Fulton or Keen Kutter are Sargents underneath.
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Stanley
Stanley is the reference point for American hand-tool collecting. The 1869 purchase of Leonard Bailey's plane patents gave Stanley Rule & Level the adjustable iron bench plane that defined the category for a century, and the company's habit of quietly revising castings, logos and hardware left behind a fine-grained record that collectors read as a dating system.