What is this tool? Electric router plane?

[Zach England]

Ebay item 260543634364

Was this a stanley production?

[Rick Whitehead]

Yes, it was a Stanley production item.
It's a door plane, used for planing or beveling the edges of doors.Stanley sold these in a kit which included a hinge template, a router, and the plane attachment. The advantage was that you only needed one router motor, instead of a router and a separate door plane, like the Porter-Cable set.It used the same motor as their standard router, with a special long spiral cutter.That cutter is missing in the photo.I'm not sure what the cutter is that is on the plane, but it's not the right one.It's also missing the fence.
If you're thinking of bidding on this, I would advise against it. I don't know if you can get parts for a Stanley router any more.Since the cutter is missing, you'd have to find one of those. The whole unit looks like it's been used heavily, so I wonder how well it works.If you need a door plane, I'd advise looking elsewhere.
Hope this helps.
Rick W

[Zach England]

Thanks. No, no intention of bidding on it. I just wondered what it was. I guess it sort of seems like a good idea, but looks terribly awkward to hold. I can't imagine it is light, either.

[Jim Koepke]

I guess it sort of seems like a good idea, but looks terribly awkward to hold.

Well of course, that is the left hand version.

jim

[Kevin French]

I found the B&D version of it in the dump in great shape, but never tried it. I saved it but I guess it's there if I remember it when/if I need it.

[Jeff Burks]

One of the earliest successful companies that developed hand held electric routers was R.L. Carter. This guy had a bunch of patents in the 1920s, many of which were the forerunners of the modern door hanger's toolkit.

Some time in the early 1930s the R.L. Carter company was acquired by the Stanley Works and the Door Planer that was Carter patent 1,736,965 became a Stanley product.

I have a bunch of advertisments from these companies but I don't have time to dig them all up for this forum. I was able to locate one from 1936 on my computer that shows the door plane in action after the Stanley buyout, when the Carter items had their own division within Stanley Works.

Electric Power Planers for doors and floors etc have been around for a long time though. Most of them are listed on the USPTO under US Classification 30/475

Sadly Google Patents won't list them all because of the flaws in OCR and the poor quality of the source images. I'll try to post a direct link, though I don't know of the site scripting will time out or not allow others to view. If this link is busted just look them up manually from the quick search using the following criteria:
Term 1: 30/475
Field 1: Current US Classification
Select Years: 1790 to present [entire database]

Then hit search and you should get 134 instead of the ~40 or so you get doing the same search on Google Patents Advanced Search. I always jump to the last hit and search in reverse chronological order to see the oldest patents first.

You might need to install the browser plugin AlternaTIFF to view the images. And the images are always worth seeing because many are great for a laugh. I wonder how many digits were severed during the development and testing of the tools in this category?