I guess many of you have seen this Hong Kong/Chinese brand but might have been put off by the low prices. However there are a number of very positive reviews in the internet already.
Since I feel my LV Jack plane is a bit too large in some occasions, but I could not afford the LV BUS yet, I decided to give this plane a try. If it turned out to be a dud, 38 euro is not that big of a hole.
The cutting angle is a healthy 60 degrees. The blade is HSS, 1 3/4 (44mm) wide. Sole is 231x59mm, or 9" x 2 1/2 and a bit. So it is very slightly smaller than a No. 4.
The body is made from Indian rosewood and feels nice in the hand. It is nicely polished to satin except the sole which was glossy. There is no tearout or tool marks anywhere. The sole measured reasonably flat, with just a slight belly in the center. Perhaps some of the rounding was due to the final polishing. The blade came well sharpened and honed. At this price, it was quite a surprise. I decided to use it out of the box and it worked well enough.
Then I sharpened the blade on 1200 and 8000 waterstones. The sharpening difficulty feels comparable to my A2 LV blades. It might actually be a hair easier to sharpen than A2. I feared HSS might be very difficult, and not taking a fine edge, but it is really not the case. It reaches hair shaving sharpness without much fight.
Further more, it seems to be less brittle than A2 or Japanese steel. After intensive use the edge roughness has a finer "roughness grain" when looking with a magnifier.
After sharpening, I flattened the sole using my Jack plane, took a couple minutes. Then I put it in a vise and scraped two very shallow dishes on both sole halves, similar, but not as deep as what a Japanese kanna has in the front section. I reckon this can reduce friction for a bit.
Unlike the kanna, the Chinese plane have the mouth in the middle of the length, making both pull and push planing possible. Speaking of which, the mouth is nice and tight. When pulling the hand sits nice in the front scallop. When pushing, the handle bar (not pictured, a stick wedged in that hole) offers a solid and secure grip.
The wedge benefited from 30 seconds of planing to make it flat and better fitting.
Given the very high angle, the chips are usually very concertinaed and tend to break and clog. However it leaves a remarkably clean, tear-free surface on both interlocked grain rosewood and curly maple. I was already getting a pretty decent surface with the Jack set to York pitch, and a very fresh blade, followed by some scraping but this one is a step up.
Again because of the angle, it doesn't work well on spruce or cedar, but feels OK on Spanish cedar.
I think that for difficult grain hardwood, it fits like a glove between a normal pitch smoother/Jack, or even York pitch, and final scraping or sanding. Sure I could have bought one more blade for my Jack and bevel it to 60 deg but the Chinese plane adds more color to my tool collection
Bottom line, unless you already have a fancy, well tuned up metal smoother, or simply hate wooden planes, this is worth considering and a shameless steal at about 50$. Not sure where you can get it in America though. Mine came from Germany. LV only has a small, block plane version (29$) of this design, plus some normal pitch planes.
One more thing is that by reversing the blade in iron up position you get an effective scraper plane. Tried it and works nice. I might buy one more just for this.
Hope this helps.
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