Phil Edwards is the man behind Britain’s only commercial maker of traditional wooden planes – Philly Planes – but his route into plane making has the elements of misfortune, serendipity, marketing nouse and, above all, hard work and skill, typical of many successful small businesses. I recently spent a thoroughly enjoyable morning in his Dorset workshop, seeing some of his beautiful planes and hearing his story.
Finding the right career
Originally trained as a chef, Phil first took up woodworking as a hobby and then decided to make a career change to work as a site carpenter, hanging doors and fitting kitchens. Alongside his new career, Phil continued developing his furniture-making skills and started writing about his projects for woodworking magazines.
After a while, an editor looking for something a bit different asked him if he fancied having a go at making a plane that could be used as the basis for a series of magazine articles. There followed an intense period of book buying – Phil reckons he has just about all the books there are on aspects of plane making – and research. The nine resulting articles on a variety of aspects of plane making led to two things; a realisation that plane making was something for which he could develop a serious passion and numerous requests by readers for him to make planes for them. The fact that this coincided with being made redundant from his carpentry job added a considerable incentive to consider whether these various strands of fate might be pointing to another new career, in making planes.
“Hard though making such a life changing and financially risky decision was, actually putting the idea into practice and turning it into a living proved a whole lot harder”
Phil has found social media sites, such as Facebook and Instagram, useful for reaching a younger audience.
Building a business
And so it was that Philly Planes was launched with a website in 2007, but hard though making such a life changing and financially risky decision was, actually putting the idea into practice and turning it into a living proved a whole lot harder. As Phil explained to me, he had first to find his own distinctive plane making ‘voice’. At first he made anything asked of him and even surveyed prospective customers about what they were looking for; the resulting ‘customer committee’ plane proved not to be very popular – a valuable lesson in the value of inexpert market research.
A re-evaluation of his fledgling business’ direction led to the conclusion that if he concentrated on the types of planes with which he most personally connected – those made by the best English makers of the 18th and 19th centuries such as Robert Wooding and William Madox (early and mid 18th century respectively) – there might be enough woodworkers who shared his passion to make a successful business.
That there was no one in the UK and almost no one in North America doing this at the time was proof that either there was a gap in the market or that there was no market! Happily, the success of Philly Planes clearly demonstrates that there is a market. However, finding your plane-making niche is only part of the story. Phil had also to find ways of making his products cost-effectively, source materials, solve the problem of metal components – more about these later – and also work out a marketing strategy.
In the 21st century a website is vital to building a market presence but it is only a starting point. In the first year Phil attended just about every show he could find to gain awareness among as many woodworkers as possible; now he is much more selective. However, a website and show appearances are not enough, you need to persuade people to visit your site, and here Phil views an active presence on social media such as Facebook, YouTube and especially Instagram as vitally important.
I asked him whether he had noticed a new interest among younger, social media savvy, people in the use of hand tools and, if so, to what he attributes it. He believes this revival in interest is indeed real and attributes it to a world which, for so many, is highly virtual in both social and work terms, but fails to meet a fundamental human need for a creative outlet involving the use of hands, brain and real tactile materials in a rewarding way. Social media is uniquely capable of reaching out to this group to demonstrate that there are accessible ways to meet this need.
Making the planes
Philly planes are, with few exceptions, made from the traditional British plane- making wood – quartersawn beech (Fagus sylvatica). Given the relatively plentiful supply of beech you might be forgiven for thinking that you could simply ring one of the major timber merchants and order quartersawn beech, just as you can quartersawn oak (Quercus robur), but you can’t. It seems that these suppliers reserve all their quartersawn boards for the major furniture makers, so it is a question of touring all the timber yards in a 50 mile radius in the hope that they have a recently sawn butt or two from which the centre boards can be pulled and purchased; a time-consuming business.
Plane makers through the ages have developed their own methods of making, not least when it comes to the tricky matter of forming the throat and mouth. Many devised ingenious machines for this process, which they kept well away from the eyes of competitors and did not record for the same reason. So, today’s plane maker is still on his own and Phil uses the decidedly low-tech combination of a pillar drill and hand tools. For this he has a wide selection of floats, some made by Lie-Nielsen and some smaller homemade versions for places where access is more restricted. Floats are an underrated woodworking tool, working like a row of scrapers accurately aligned in one plane to enable a flat surface to be formed in places that cannot be reached with other hand tools or routers.
Recesses such as those for the metal work on a moving fillister are formed using a small milling machine which, while not really up to the job of working accurately in metal, is perfectly capable of producing neat, accurate recesses in wood. Having never previously done any metal working, this is another skill that Phil has taught himself and for it he uses a somewhat larger mill that is well up to the job of working mostly in brass. All metal components for the planes, apart from screws and T nuts, are made in house.
“Throughout the ages craftsmen have adopted the technologies available to them in order to earn a better living and make a better product”
This includes blades that are made from O1 tool steel. Phil does his own heat treatment and has found that the cleanest and quickest way is to use a gas blow torch for heating and an oil bath for quenching, using a combination of changing steel colour with rising temperature and the fact that steel ceases to be magnetic at the required temperature – determined with ‘a magnet on a stick’. Low tech, but it works.
Despite catering for hand tool enthusiasts and enjoying hand work himself, Phil cannot afford the luxury of performing every operation by hand and uses machinery where this will cut the making time or improve quality. He is baffled by the antipathy the use of machines seems to generate in some enthusiasts on the basis that a plane which has had machines used in its making somehow lacks purity. As he says, “Throughout the ages craftsmen have adopted the technologies available to them in order to earn a better living and make a better product, whether that be the pit saw or a CNC router, and it is only in relatively recent times that anyone has thought any the worse of them or their products for it.” I could only agree with him. Perhaps it is a legacy of the Arts and Crafts movement, which romanticised the idea of hand work as some kind of higher calling.
Workshop
The Philly Planes workshop is a converted double garage and, as will be apparent from the photographs shown here, it is not the surgically clean and tidy workplace sometimes seen in F&C profiles. It is itself a hard-working tool with plane blanks lined up on its upper shelves but everything needed is there, from the pillar drill and mills already mentioned to a middling sized table saw, a jointer, router table, and wood and metal working lathes, not forgetting a well-worn workbench with front and tail vices and a small wood burning stove to keep warm.
The future
There can be little doubt that Philly Planes has a bright future. Phil Edwards is an affable and engaging promoter of his excellent planes and clearly has the skills, inventiveness and adaptability needed to solve any problems he encounters. When asked if Philly Planes could ever be more than a one-man business his response was an emphatic ‘Yes’. He has a nine month waiting list, 60% of his output goes to North America, he is expanding his range to include more specialist models and the hand tool revival is running in his favour.
The three years he reckons it takes for a business like his to become viable has been weathered and he is now making a living. The biggest obstacle to expansion is finding a young person with the right combination of application and aptitude to learn the trade.
Finally, if you were in any doubt as to how multi-dimensional Phil Edwards is, many of his weekends are taken up with playing guitar and singing in mod-revival band The Lambrettas!
Contact: Philly Planes