In the spirit of enquiry, I bought an Anant No 4 smoother (not from Rutlands, but for peanuts off eBay, unused), just to see if these planes are as bad as they are reputed to be. Mine was !
Out of the box it was completely useless - wouldn't produce shavings in anything. The blade wasn't sharp, the back wasn't nearly flat, and the edge was well out-of-square. The chipbreaker / cap iron didn't sit square on the blade (so shavings quickly got jammed between them). The frog didn't seat the blade firmly or square. The base was not very flat, and the sides not square to the base.
These problems are all correctable, but it takes a lot of effort. Even when I had corrected most of them (didn't bother with side-squaring to base) though, it still wouldn't work adequately until I swapped the blade + chipbreaker for a pair from a Stanley plane. This made a noticeable improvement, so I have to conclude that the irons in Anant planes are total rubbish. At least it will now take shavings if the wood isn't to difficult - but the performance is
very poor compared with my own (oldish) Stanley and with several second-hand Record planes I own.
From my experience, I'd absolutely agree with jordec66
jordec66":12q2y2km said:
Anant planes are cheap because the're cr*p, why not go for a vintage record or stanley, readily available on e bay, set up correctly they are wonderful tools.
