With obvious exceptions, all woodworking tools are intended primarily to remove small amounts of material by some kind of cutting or tearing action. With this simple fact in mind, it is no surprise to learn that saws, planes, chisels, and boring tools found in ancient Egyptian tombs, or depicted by artists of that time, were not significantly different from those of the eighteenth century after Christ. (Examples of furniture made in ancient Egypt, incidentally, still exist, the oldest known articles being stools dating at least from the First Dynasty—3500 B.C.!) Nor should it be surprising to find that the colonial cabinetmaker’s tools, although cruder and less convenient than those sold in a modern hardware store, were fundamentally the same and did the same jobs in the same ways. Furthermore, in the hands of a skilled craftsman the eighteenth-century tools performed their assigned tasks every bit as well as do their twentieth-century counterparts. _PLAIN PLANES AND FANCY ONES_ If it appears that Dickinson’s 81 planes were far more than any cabinetmaker needed, the number is easily explained by the likelihood that only a few were “bench planes,” the rest being “fitting-planes” or specially shaped “molding planes.” Then as now the bench plane category included a group of flat-bottomed planes used for smoothing, leveling, and squaring pieces of wood. Varying in length from the smoothing plane of about 6 inches to the jointer of perhaps 30 inches, the group included also the trying plane, long plane, fore plane, jack plane, and strike block. Fitting planes were those—each designed for a particular purpose—used to prepare pieces of wood for fitting together. This group included planes for making rabbets, tongues, grooves, and similar shapes, and having such names as the plough, match, fillister, and moving fillister. The last was essentially a rabbet plane with an adjustable fence to guide the width of its cut, often an adjustable stop to regulate the depth of cut, and sometimes a routing bit or tooth just ahead of the leading edge of the main blade. The third and largest group in any eighteenth-century tool collection included the molding planes for producing ornamental trim in an almost infinite variety of shapes. In the absence of machine-made millwork in stock sizes and profiles, the colonial woodworker had to produce his own. In some instances, he may even have made his own molding planes first. The eighteenth-century plane was a simple but effective device. It had only three basic parts: a body, an iron, and a wedge. The body or “stock” was a rectangular block of beech (or some other hard wood) with a shaped vertical opening through the center. The iron, inserted into this opening, was held at the proper pitch and blade exposure by tapping the wedge tightly into position. Handles were usually attached to the larger planes.