Veritas Router Plane Review — and What You Can Buy on Amazon
Veritas sells its router planes direct through Lee Valley and nowhere else. Here is how they compare with the Bench Dog open-throat plane you can order today.
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A router plane does one thing nothing else does well: it cuts to a set depth below the reference surface, over and over. That is why it survives in an age of electric routers. A tenon cheek, a hinge mortise, the bottom of a hand-cut dado — all of them need to end up at one consistent depth, and a chisel gets you close while a router plane gets you exact.
The Veritas planes, and where to get them
Veritas makes three: the Small, the Medium and the Large (the Large is what most people mean by “the Veritas router plane”). Lee Valley owns Veritas and sells them direct — in the US, Canada and internationally through leevalley.com. They are not stocked on Amazon in any meaningful way. The occasional Veritas listing you will find there is a third-party seller, usually the miniature plane, usually at a markup.
That is not a knock on the tool. The Veritas adjuster is the best in the class: a threaded depth mechanism with a graduated dial that lets you take a measured increment and come back to the same setting a week later. The blades are A2 or PM-V11, the castings are square out of the box, and the fence and depth stop accessories fit properly. If you are buying one plane to keep, this is it, and the extra step of ordering from Lee Valley is not a real obstacle.
What you can buy on Amazon instead
The score at the top of this page belongs to the Bench Dog open-throat router plane, because that is the tool you can put in a cart today, and it is close enough in function to be a real alternative rather than a consolation prize.
It is a ductile cast iron body — 7-5/8 in long, 2.95 lb with the fence — carrying a 3 in blade that presents a 1 in deep cutting edge on a 3/8 in square shaft. The square shaft is the important detail: the iron cannot twist in the seat, which is the failure that makes cheap router planes useless. Depth is set with a fine screw feed, and the blade can be reversed to work into a corner. The open throat gives you a clear view of the cut, which is the main argument for this style over a closed-mouth plane.
Where it gives ground to the Veritas is exactly where you would expect. The depth adjuster works but is not graduated in the same repeatable way, so returning to a previous setting is a matter of feel. The iron needs a proper honing before the plane will do anything but scrape. And the casting has the small roughnesses that a two-hundred-dollar plane does not.
Which to buy
If the job is occasional hinge mortises and the odd tenon, the Bench Dog is enough tool, and the money saved buys a decent sharpening stone — which you will need either way, because a router plane is only as good as its iron.
If you cut joinery by hand regularly, buy the Veritas Medium or Large from Lee Valley. The adjuster alone justifies it over a few hundred joints, and these are planes that get handed down rather than replaced.
What works
- A ductile cast iron body at 2.95 lb gives the mass a router plane needs — a light plane chatters in the cut and this one does not
- The blade shaft is square rather than round, so the iron cannot rotate out of position mid-cut, and the blade reverses to reach into corners
- The removable side fence turns it into a usable dado and rabbet tool rather than just a hinge-mortise cleaner
What doesn't
- The fine screw feed is coarser and less repeatable than the Veritas adjuster — setting a depth you can return to exactly takes more fiddling
- The iron arrives needing proper honing before it will take a clean shaving, so budget sharpening time before the first use
- Fit and finish are one clear grade below Veritas or Lie-Nielsen: expect to ease a few edges and clean up the casting