Why are smoothers shorter?

The jack won’t get into subtle valleys in a surface the
way a smoother will, so when you do smoothing with
a jack, you make more work for yourself because
you will be obliged to make the board flatter than necessary.

So in reality a jack has a cambered iron, and a smoother doesn’t. A smoother will have a tighter mouth and chip breaker closer to the edge of the iron.

The length has more to do with it than the leveling qualities. Its also about size. You tend to skew a smoother a lot more than you will a jack when planing. So at that point your not flattening with the waves, but actually making them worse.

If its a transitional, you’ll need to make sure the mouth is tight enough for a smoother, other than that, if you get it shortened as a smoother and tuned as a smoother it should work just fine. It may be a little awkward because your knob and tote will be closer to the ends than normal, but that will just be a technique change. Most transitional smoothers either didn’t have a tote, or have a razee style back end.

For the price of a good #3 or #4, why not just sell the jack and buy a smoother?

-- There is nothing like the sound of a well tuned hand plane. - http://timetestedtools.wordpress.com (timetestedtools at hotmail dot c0m)

planes are like guns or Camera lenses, the long the distance to be “shot”, the long the canon or lense needed.
you can perfectly “shop” the plane and use it as an smoother, in fact if you compare the Stanley No 4 1/2 and a jointer No7 both uses the exact blade and body width. the only diference could be the position of tote and front knob, obviously a jointer has more room for them.

Mouth opening, chip breaker issues, cambered edge do not have anything to do with the plane lenght, BUT with the type of wood being planed, a matter that is the same in both planes.

-- Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain" Frank Lloyd Wright

Thanks for the replies, it makes sense now. Turns out I broke transitional casting (lots of rust), so I won’t be going that route, but it’s great info for future stuff.

-- Brian T. - Exact science is not an exact science

If you want to understand the different planes and their uses get the DVD, ‘Coarse Medium & Fine’, by Christopher Schwarz. This is a really good explanation of the different planes and their use.

-- John - Van Alstyne ,Texas