Premium Stanleys

I doubt that the recent flurry of excitement over Stanley's proposed re-entry in the world of decent hand tools has escaped you. It almost escaped me, so off the pace am I at the moment. Anyway, I haven't read all the reaction by any means (not enough hours in the day!) but some of the comments concerning the planes madeth me to howl. "I see the Stanley designers have the LV catalogue then" and so forth. 

Kiddies, I present for your consideration the Stanley 60 1/2 A. Made in England, c.1983. Couldn't get hold of Scrit for his permission to copy his excellent pics here, so please follow the yellow brick road. Since that thread, I have actually seen a 9 1/2 A as well, but the price was sufficiently high to dissuade purchase just for the sake of knowledge. I consider plane design as a game of pass the parcel; some players unwrap more layers at a time than others, but basically it's still the same present in the middle.

There ya go; my thought for the day. ;-)

An eagle-eyed and long-memoried reader reminds me that I frequented the premises of Pennyfarthing Tools earlier this year, and thus have hunted rust. I protest. Going to a well-appointed dealer is as akin to genuine rust hunting as helping yourself to a buffet is to going out and hunting antelope on the plains of the Serengeti. Pish, I say. And even tush. No, my elephant gun is hung over the mantlepiece, my feet are be-slippered and toasting before the fire of rust retirement. Once the last rhinoceros head has been stuffed and mounted, that's me done. Of course, given how many things await cleaning, that moment of true rust cessation is still some distance off...