Spear & Jackson CJP5 Carpenters No.5 Jack Plane

Update 24/06/2020: Just a few nit-picks, since I stripped the whole plane down today. I noticed the handle has, like, a burn near the bottom, but it could just be a knot, maybe the wood swelled at the knot where it interacted with the coating or something, but the finish on the wood seems a bit rough all over in general. Not a big deal considering the price of the plane. When I removed the handle (tote), I saw that the bolt that holds it on was quite rusty; pretty weird as the rest of the plane looks pristine, but still no big deal. The bolt on the adjustment knob has some imperfections, meaning the adjustment knob gets a little bit stuck around the middle, a little annoying but not much of a problem, and will probably improve over time.. The frog needed a bit of smoothing as the finish was, again, a bit rough, and just about every surface where the frog meets the base was either rough, uneven, had overspills of paint, or was just not sitting correctly. A bit annoying.. I spent a few hours smoothing, grinding, checking, everything. Still, I'm not going to remove any stars, because I like the plane, and it worked great even before I went at it (yes, it works better now) and I don't see these things being a deal breaker. I mean, if you're looking for the absolute perfect plane then you should probable be spending a few hundred quid for something where somebody is going to go and grind and smoothen everything perfectly for you, time is money as they say. But if you're looking for something to take a shaving from your door that swells in the winter, or you're new to woodwork, or you don't mind the little imperfections, or if you want to put in the time yourself getting it perfect, then this is definitely a good choice. It feels really solid, I'd definitely prefer this to one of those plastic handled planes, or the cheap looking ones with the tiny blades and the little spokeshave adjustments. I have a few old refurbished no. 4 planes, but I always reach for this one when I work on anything large or tough, the extra weight and momentum is great. But probably not good for planing a door in situ.. It even has a frog adjustment screw which I'm pretty sure you wouldn't usually get on a cheap plane. Albeit it also took a bit of filing to get it working right. I definitely has some fun tweaking this plane, and I'll probably do some more to it as time goes on. It's a fun project! Original Review: No complaints. I'm not an expert, but this has been working fine for me so far. I think it was fairly sharp out of the box, but I sharpened it myself anyway and gave everything a bit of a smoothing/grinding. All the adjustments work, it feels good and solid. Even if it wasn't sharp out of the box you can't really complain anyway. I mean, it's a plane, you're probably going to be sharpening it every few days anyway, and tweaking, and smoothing parts of it. Great for the price.

Once setup took me 3 hours to flatten Bottom and sharpen iron and found cutting iron was bent so didn't fit flat in frog , very disappointed, for its a very nice plane.

This is first plane I've ever been able to use straight from the box.... highly recommended for quality of tool and price. It took shavings straight off the stock, and whilst it will require some fine tuning for my type of work, it is very much worth its price tag. Highly recommended, its 5 stars from me.

A good quality hand plane, useable straight out of the box with minimal adjustment.

Needs a considerable amount of work to get it cut reasonably. Plane iron and cap poorly finished. If you don’t mind spending a lot of time trying to get it right then this has to be a bargain but do not expect it to work well out of the box.

Brilliant plane and would recommend the product to anyone, I honed the blade myself to give me the perfect polished edge and I get very fine results with it

What can I say. Good

Great for the price, mine was pretty square on the body, pretty flat on the sole, just needed an edge adding to the iron and planed down 32 feet of hard stripwood to form a cill. Okay, it's not a premium tool, and you do need the bits to sharpen the blade, but fabulous for the price, love the weight when planing hard stripwood.