Cloning the classics: Router bits and antique planes

The moldings on brownstone doors in my part of Brooklyn have intricate, tightly packed profiles that would have likely been milled on-site by a worker wielding a molding plane similar to the Stanley 45 shown above.

Our friend Nate at South Slope Woodworks uses that same plane to reproduce and restore said doors, changing out its soles to cut the same complex profiles carpenters carved out 100 years ago.

"You have to use the old tools to understand how the work was done, and to compare how the modern tools measure up," Nate says.

See those green blades in the foreground? It's a router bit Lee Valley claims can clone the exact moldings the Stanley planes produced a century ago.

So does it make the cut?

The short answer: yes indeed.

You can see, on the blade off to the right, how the cutting surface ends right at the edge of the plane blade. Most router bits have a big chunk of metal that would take away too much of the adjacent wood, but these carve the slim moldings and deep channels characteristic of the Stanley 55, a descendant of the tool shown above.

The router bits do fine work, Nate says, and he concedes that they are a little faster than the Stanley.

But to watch him switch a blade, adjust the fence, and make a couple of passes with his plane, it's obvious the old tool still gets plenty of use.