The fine folks at Horizon Wood Products in Western Pennsylvania are making available Beech blanks for making bench planes. This quarter sawn 16/4 material is European Beech (Fagus Sylvatica), not the American Beech (Fagus Grandifolia) I wrote about earlier. For those of you excited about the English Woodworker and his upcoming lessons on making a handplane, this should be perfect. I know, I know, in an earlier video, Richard made a workable plane out of some roadkill lumber he fished out of the scrap pile, just to show that it could be done. OK, I got his point, but for something as demanding as a bench plane that might be handed down and put to work for generations, you can’t go wrong with this.

George R. Walker