Synopsis: Al Breed has collected quite a few handplanes over the years, and he finds each of them rewarding in its own way. There are a few favorites, though, that he wouldn’t want to work without: the panel-raising plane, shopmade planes for reproducing specific molding profiles, his Stanley 45 combination plane, the Stanley 79 side rabbet plane, a toothing plane, and—least in size but not in importance—the Kunz skunk plane.

When I was in my teens, while many of my contemporaries were buying and fixing up cars, I was busy buying and fixing up antique furniture. I was also fascinated by the tools used to make the pieces I bought. One of the first planes I acquired was given to me by a man in town who repaired old furniture. He called it a bridge-builder’s plane. (I didn’t try too hard to figure out exactly which part of a…