The Veritas Bullnose Shoulder Plane is one sweet tool.
The Veritas Bullnose Shoulder Plane is one sweet tool. It’s exceptionally well made, allows for very fine cutter adjustment, converts easily from a bull nose to a chisel plane, fits the hand like a glove, and slips easily into a shop apron pocket. Adjusting the mouth opening in consort with the depth adjustment knob enables you to take feather fine cuts or extra thick shavings. The bed is set at 15º and the blade bevel is set at 25º to give a 40º cutting angle, which makes for easy cutting with or across grain. The sides are machined square to the sole. Tolerances here are very high, I didn’t need to make any adjustment to true the sole.
A lot of joinery in woodworking involves the use of rabbets (a stepped cut with or against the grain on the side of a board), dadoes (a cut across the grain), and grooves (a cut with the grain). Bullnose planes, and their cousins, rabbet planes, are particularly useful in fine tuning and truing these joints. With a 1″ cutting width, the Veritas Bullnose plane is just the right size for a wide range of this type of work. I especially liked this plane for trimming shoulders of tenons, and cleaning dadoes cut with the table saw or router.
While you might not use the Veritas Bullnose as a chisel plane all that often, when you do need it, you’ll be glad to have it. It does a much better job of cleaning up stopped dadoes and chamfers than you can accomplish with a chisel. If you don’t have a rabbet plane, then consider buying this plane first. Competitively priced at $169.
Carl Duguay - [email protected]
Carl is a Victoria-based furniture maker and the web editor at Canadian Woodworking & Home Improvement.
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