Review on WoodRiver #5 Bench Plane, V3 by Richard Cartner

This is just a beautiful hand plane. Very well made and nicely crafted. The plane works ok out of the box, but I spent about 20 minutes of tuning and my goodness is this a thing a performer. I love it and about to order the #4 smoothing plane and #6 plane. Out of the box there are 2 things you will notice. The plane is very well made and it caked in rust proofing lubricant. Some people do not like it, but I do. Just means the manufacture went to that one extra step to get me a nice product. You do want to wipe all of the oil off it though with a clean rag. Take the lever cap off. Remove the the cap iron/chip breaker and blade and wipe down the whole plane including the frog getting rid of all of that oil. Take the cap iron off the blade and give those a thorough wiping too. Before putting it back together. Break out a flat head screwdriver and check that the frog adjustment, tote, front knob screws are tight. No need to over tighten them. Just make sure they are tight. Run a finger across the mouth of the plane and see if you feel any burrs. If so use a flat file to to file down those burrs. Nothing to aggressive. My planes mouth was fine and did not require any filing, but I have heard some of these do. I also gave the blade some honing. From a 1000 diamond plate to 8000 to 16000. No need to bother with the mating surfaces between the blade and cap iron. They are already perfectly mated. Then reassemble the plane. No need to bother with the sole on these planes as they come perfectly flat. The whole tuning process took me about 20 minutes if that and it's a beautifully working plane. Now if this was a lie nelson and I had to tune it. I would be giving it 3 stars, because I shouldn't have to tune a 325 dollar plane out of the box, but this is a 180 dollar plane that only took 20 minutes of out of the box tuning and that deserves 5 stars in my book. I have a couple of the newer stanley sweetheart planes that require much more tuning out of the box. In my opinion this wood river #5 plane is the best jack plane for the money. Unless you want to buy one of the older stanley bedrocks and spend days tuning it. On top of that putting a nice blade and cap iron on it like Hock plane blades will cost you about 70-80 bucks. This is a nice option and I have done that to a couple of older stanleys that I love, but in the end you are expending a lot of energy and money getting the plane back to usable condition. When you can just purchase one of the woodriver planes. Unless you just like restoring old planes, which is very nice to do but can get pretty time consuming and tedious.