I've always liked my Record jack plane (which I bought after returning a piece of junk Stanley) but when I looked to pick up another plane or two, I saw Record is no more.
Now they're pushing Anant planes. Anyone have nay experience with them?
A jointing plane can be seen here:
Same guy who wrote the grant for the Grizzly power tools bought four of them for our school. As of twelve years ago, I can testify to them being virtually unusable junk. May have changed since.
One look at what we had would have convinced me to pass on them. They looked as bad as they worked.
They're not the bottom of the barrel, but they're awfully close to it. Worse than Kunz or modern Stanley, although not as fragile as modern Stanley. Just a bit better than some of the worst Chinese bucketware.
There's an interesting FWW article of a few years ago (1999 ?) where they tested plane tune-up parts, such as irons and cap irons. They included an Anant in this review (probably the one and only in FWW) as an example of the real bottom end to see how much difference careful tuning could make.
You can do useful work with an Anant, if that's all you have. But don't spend money on the damn thing!
Do yourself a favor and buy a plane from Steve Knight, Lee Valley, Lie Nielson, or get an E-bay plane and put a Hock Iron in it. Your money will be well spent and you can move on to making shavings. I have all of the above and attest to the quality of the merchandise.
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