Brese 875 Smoother--It's Done

After a couple months of work, the Brese 875-W50 is complete. Here's an explanation of the model number.

875 stand for 8-3/4", the length of the plane's sole.

W stands for "wide", a reference to the 2-1/4" wide iron.

And finally 50 stands for the bedding angle. Since this is a bevel down plane, it also refers to the cutting angle.

After a week of finishing the ebony and another week of curing time, I rubbed out the finish (padding lacquer, followed by a few thin coats of Tru-Oil) and applied a couple coats of Renaissance Wax, honed the iron, and set plane to wood. I have a particular piece of cherry that I like to test planes with. It had some curl to it, but not too much. It strikes a good balance between "difficult" and "cooperative". It also looks beautiful when planed.

This kit was extremely satisfying to build. With careful work, diligence, and some coaching from Brese, I now own a world-class infill plane capable of taking incredibly fine shavings, well under one thousandth of an inch. But more importantly, the surface of the wood left in this plane's wake is stunning. Absolutely smooth, lustrous, silky, chatoyant, with great depth and character. It just begs to be touched.

Thanks to Ron Brese for providing a way, with some skilled work of course, for more people to enjoy the pleasure of high-performance planes at a more reasonable cost. I can't recommend enough a plane kit from Brese Plane.

One can only describe the performance of this tool to an extent. It really has to be experienced. So I'll let these photos do the rest of the talking. Make sure you also take a look at the following video, it should give a better idea of the performance of the tool. Warning: In order to preserve the high quality video, this is a large file, about 28 megabytes.

Video: Brese 875-W50

If you're interested in obtaining a plane kit from Ron, he can be reached at ronbrese@breseplane.com