Talk:Jack plane

Clarification of opening sentence

The opening sentence says "A jack plane is the general-purpose bench plane, used for general smoothing of the edges, sizing of timber but only making it smaller to correct size — wood edge jointing." That seems very confusingly worded and grammatically incorrect. What is it trying to say? —BarrelProof (talk) 00:07, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

I agree. The first sentence doesn't read well. The phrase "but only making it smaller" seems both out of place grammatically and a bit nonsensical: do people think are there woodworking tools that make wood larger? [Where do I get one? Think of the money it would save!]

The punctuation doesn't look right to me either; why is there a comma after "bench plane"?

I would also probably change it to say its primary use is to flatten surfaces rather than to smooth them. Smooth does not imply flat, and a jack plane is more about flattening. There's a shorter plane (called a smoothing plane) when what you're after is smooth more than flat.

—Gredw (talk) 19:39, 9 June 2014 (UTC)