Brief review Soba (Axminster own brand) 7 jointer

[jim_hanna]

Brief review of the Soba (Axminster own brand) 7 jointer

I ordered an Axminster 7 jointer bench plane last Friday evening, dispatched on Monday, delivered mid-day Tuesday which was impressive.

The catalogue illustration shows a Groz logo on the lever cap but the supplied item was in a Soba box (also an Indian company I believe)

First cosmetic examination showed a nick in the trailing edge of the sole. The Soba plane uses a screw type cap rather than the conventional lever. The black japanning looks crude.

The machining on the frog surfaces looked good. I then put the plane on a sheet of glass (an Ikea table top, checked for flatness with a couple of levels as straight edges). The sole is flat to the limit of my ability to check it with the sheet of glass and feeler gauges. Sides are square to the sole, checked with an engineering square.
I put in a Stanley 60mm iron (from an old Stanley 5 ½ Jack ) and tried it without doing any work to the chipbreaker. The supplied blade is the same thickness as the Stanley, 2.3 mm, but a quick initial pass on a stone showed it needed a lot of work on the back to flatten it.
I was able to take thin shavings easily, admittedly only on pine which was all I had to hand.

Thin shavings.

Then I tried to sharpen the supplied iron, the back needed a lot of work (well over an hour working on my coarsest diamond stone for the first step) and even when I got it to a flat back I couldn’t get a satisfactory edge using an Eclipse honing guide.

Three+ hours work on various grade diamond stones (and sore fingers).

The stock iron is warped now, not sure if it was like that to start with, I’ve never spent so long flattening the back of a plane blade. Pushed down on a cast iron table with my fingers at the front and my thumb in the middle, one side of the flattened blade front edge was on the table and I could slip a .08mm feeler gauge under the other side.

Blade won’t lie flat.

In summary the important parts of the plane, the casting and frog machining, seem fine and I’ll have a very usable plane once I get a decent iron. The package as a whole is let down by the quality of the supplied iron but at least that’s something that can be fixed.

Regards

Jim

 

[gasman]

I am already worried about the direction this thread might take
Any more than 10 seconds flattening or sharpening anything and it all kicks off...

 

[Cheshirechappie]

I've heard it said that when buying the budget planes, you're not buying a plane, you're buying a kit of parts to which you may have to do some work to make a decent plane.

By the sounds of it, Axminster/Soba/Groz have got pretty close to a decent plane, cosmetics and blade aside. That it'll produce thin shavings and (presumably) leave a straight, flat finish is indication enough that the main casting is good enough and properly machined, so that saves a lot of fettling. It's irritating that the blade is poor, and a pity that it was so bad an assessment of it's ability to keep an edge couldn't be tested, but a replacable blade (even a modern Stanley or Record for about £12 or so) is fairly easily arranged.

Vintage try/jointer planes sell on the 'Bay and through dealers for anything between £50 and over £100 (and at the cheaper end may need a fair bit of work), so the axminster at £45 (plus delivery and maybe a blade) does look to be fair value for money, as long as the purchaser accepts that some fettling will have to be done to give a reasonably performing plane.