Help with picking out Veritas hand planes

FWIW, my opinion, in order
Block plane (either regular or low angle)
Smoother (#4)
low angle jointer
Scrub
Veritas makes top notch stuff
Woodriver, good and useable but not top notch.
I own both

-- My Boss was a carpenter

I have almost every one they make, and am happy with them all. I would recommend you start with the low angle Jack plane and the bevel up Smoother.

They are easy to find on the website.

Good luck!

-- Randy "You are judged as much by the questions you ask as the answers you give..."

I own quite a few of their planes and as others have said, they’re a top quality tool. If you want to flatten rough sawn boards you might consider their scrub plane—it will remove wood with the quickness. Their low angle block plane is nice too, as you can get a handle and knob for it to turn it into a small smoother. I like all of their bevel up bench planes, including the holy trinity (BU smother, LA jack, and jointer). One of the nice things about them is that they all use the same size blades, so changing the blade out from say a low angle 25 degree to a 50 degree for figured woods is a snap. If I was starting from scratch, I’d buy them in this order:

1. Low angle block plane with knob and tote
2. Low angle jack
3. Jointer with the fence (really helps in edge jointing to keep the plane square to the face)
4. Scrub
5. BU smoother

Then I’d start looking at their specialty planes (e.g. scraping, shoulder, router, etc.) depending on specific needs

Good luck!

-- John, BC, Canada

Get the low-angle jack first. Order an extra blade and sharpen it to 38 degrees or a little more for smoothing type work. Keep the other at 25 degrees for shooting and other end grain stuff. It can do almost everything you might want from a plane. Stock prep and shooting are what it really excels at, but it can joint shorter edges easily and take super wispy shavings with easy adjustments.

After that, the bevel-up jointer and one of the three bevel-up smoothers. I just bought the big one, the advantage being that it takes the same blades as the other two bevel-up planes, and it’s size makes quick work of large areas. The downside is that taking a wide shaving at a steep smoother cutting angle is a lot of work and the plane is heavy. My Stanley #4 is so much lighter and easy to wield in comparison… So you might consider one of the other two.

It depends on the slabs you want to dimension….....

An ideal set would be a block plane to a jointer. But you are limited to two planes…...

Let’s say your work piece is greater than 3 feet long and you ABSOLUTELY need it flat then
go for LV bevel up jointer.

LV LA jack plane can dimension the board down pretty quickly but can’t bet a scrub plane. It also
serves as a shooting plane.

Scrub plane…. If you have thick slabs and many of them. Then this is an must.

For the LV BU and Jack you need multiple blades. 25 to 50. Tooth depends on your wood if it is figured.
After choosing the 2 plane above. Go get a LA Block plane with it’s multiple blade. It is amazing. I already own
a standard block plane from LV combined with the LV DX block plane. Good enough :)