A jack plane is the general-purpose bench plane, used for general smoothing of the edges, sizing of wood and jointing edges. Jack planes are about 12-15 inches long, and the blade can have either a slightly circled edge for smoothing stock, or a curved edge for jointing stock.
In preparing stock, the jack plane is used after the scrub plane and before the jointer plane and smoothing plane. The name is related to the saying "jack of all trades" as jack planes can be made to perform some of the work of both smoothing and jointer planes, especially on smaller pieces of work.
A jack plane came to be referred to as a "No. 5" plane or a "Bailey pattern No. 5," at the end of the 19th century. Prior to that, all but the blade was made of wood in bench planes. The "No." nomenclature originally used by Stanley Tools to label its Bailey pattern plane products continues to identify planes made by various manufacturers. Not all manufacturers of the era had the same number scheme for their planes. Millers Fall and Sargent had different numbers to refer to the same planes.
Famous quotes containing the words jack and/or plane:
“This is the priest all shaven and shorn
That married the man all tattered and torn”
—Mother Goose (fl. 17th–18th century. The House That Jack Built (l. 37–38)
“We’ve got to figure these things a little bit different than most people. Y’know, there’s something about going out in a plane that beats any other way.... A guy that washes out at the controls of his own ship, well, he goes down doing the thing that he loved the best. It seems to me that that’s a very special way to die.”
—Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976)