Identifying and Dating a Record Plane

Record is the answer to a question a lot of people arrive at eventually: where did post-war quality go, and can I buy some without paying pre-war prices?

When Stanley's British patents lapsed, the Sheffield firm of C. & J. Hampton began building Bailey-pattern planes under the Record name. They kept building them to a standard Stanley's American production had stopped meeting by the 1950s, and the secondhand market has never fully priced that in.

The numbering is Stanley's with a zero in front

A Record 04 is the equivalent of a Stanley No. 4. An 05 is a No. 5, an 07 a No. 7. Half sizes follow the same pattern: 04-1/2, 05-1/2.

The specialty planes mostly keep the relationship too: the 778 answers Stanley's 78 rabbet, the 071 the 71 router, the 405 the 45 combination plane.

Those are counterparts rather than copies. They do the same job in the same corner of the catalogue, but they are Record's own designs with their own dimensions, and no parts interchange with Stanley.

Recognising one

RECORD cast or stamped into the lever cap, and MADE IN ENGLAND on the body of most examples.

Beech handles are correct. Record used stained beech where Stanley used rosewood, and it is not a downgrade, a wartime substitution or a later replacement. People discount Record planes on this basis regularly, which is good news if you are buying.

Where Record beats Stanley

Two models are genuinely better than their Stanley counterparts rather than merely equivalent:

The 778 rabbet plane. Its fence rides on two arms where the Stanley 78 has one. The single arm on a 78 lets the fence rack under pressure, which is the exact thing that makes a 78 frustrating to use. Record fixed it. This is also the quickest way to tell the two apart in a photograph.

The 405 combination plane. Functionally the Stanley 45, but British workshops tended to keep the cutters in the box rather than scattering them, so complete sets survive far more often. Since completeness is what drives the price of any combination plane, that matters more than the design.

The 073 shoulder plane deserves a mention too — widely considered the best production shoulder plane of its era, and priced accordingly because users rather than collectors want it.

The honest bit about dating

There is no Record type study. Nothing exists that approaches the twenty-type precision of the Stanley one.

What you have to work with is the lever cap marking, the handle material, whether the plane says MADE IN ENGLAND, the style of the depth adjuster, and catalogue appearances. That gets you a decade, sometimes two. It does not get you a year, and anybody offering you a year for a Record plane is guessing.

This is worth stating plainly because the absence of a study gets mistaken for the absence of information. Record planes are extremely well documented as products — what they are, what they do, what they cost. It is their year-by-year manufacturing changes that nobody has systematically mapped.

Buying notes

Record is the value play for users, and the best-value plane on this entire site for someone who wants to work wood rather than fill a shelf. British sellers still treat these as ordinary secondhand tools.

Prices here are quoted in sterling because that is where the market is. UK prices for the same tool run well below US ones, and shipping a plane is cheap relative to the gap.

Check the same things you would on any plane: sole flat and untwisted, casting sound, mouth unfiled, iron with life in it. One Record-specific note — later examples under changed ownership are a different proposition from Sheffield-made ones, so treat the brand name alone as insufficient.

Sources

• book
  Dictionary of American Hand Tools — Alvin Sellens
• reference-site
  Patrick Leach's Blood & Gore (Stanley plane model-by-model commentary) — Patrick Leach