Record lever cap number on back?

[donie]

Hi all,

I've bought a record plane and upon having a first look at it noticed there was the number 3 stamped in the back of the lever cap. Never seen this before, does anyone know what it means? I can't seem to find anything online about it.

Thanks.

 

[Bod]

Do any of the other parts have stamped numbers?

Bod

 

[AndyT]

I don't have any external evidence for this, but my belief is that the number would just have served to identify which of many patterns was used to make the casting.
You can't do qc checks on castings until they have cooled down. If you look at a sample casting and find that there is a problem caused by wear or some other fault on a pattern, you probably need to check all the other castings recently made using the same pattern. A reference number is an easy indication of which pattern was used, letting you pick out the ones that need further inspection.

This thinking applies to modern planes like the Records with interchangeable parts.

A different system applied to earlier planes (Spiers, Norris etc) where batches of parts were fettled to fit together, and all the members of a set were marked with the same number, so they could be sorted out after being worked on together.

 

[donie]

I can't find any other stamped numbers, but being able to identify which pattern was used makes sense. Sometimes little things like these are of great interest to me, thanks AndyT!