Because the blade can be set level with the sole, you can also trim plugs or small inlays flush without marring the surrounding wood. Cast from tough ductile iron, the sole and sides are accurately machined and surface ground to be flat and square, with recesses cast into the side for grip. The large angled rear knob seats comfortably in the palm.

Commonly called a chisel plane, this 6 1/2" long by 1 3/4" wide plane has an exposed full-width blade that lets you work up to adjacent surfaces. It excels at making paring cuts in places where a chisel would be awkward or impossible to use, making short work of cleaning up corners and joints inside carcasses. We lap all of our blades* on the face to a flatness tolerance of 0.0005" or better over the working surface†, with an average roughness of 0.000005" or better. While the blade faces are smooth and true, the intersecting bevel should be honed before use. Over the past half-century, plane makers have focused more on cutting production costs than on making planes work better. For our planes, we chose to focus on better adjustment and feed mechanisms, features to prevent blade vibration, and blades offering a choice of bevels and metallurgical properties to suit your preferences. We’ve also introduced customizable planes.I get your point about the extra width lending stability (although is that really an issue?), but other than that, when is a wide chisel plane really going to help you? It'll certainly hinder you if you want to clean up all but the widest of stopped dados. When you think about it, a chisel plane offers a very stark trade-off by virtue of it's signature design element: the cutting edge is placed at the extreme front of the tool. You're giving up any and all sole forward of the iron, inviting tearout. This exchange is justified however, because a chisel plane gives you the capability of cutting right up to any sort of immovable barrier (the terminal wall(s) of a stopped dado, for instance) that would preclude the use of an ordinary plane. But a chisel plane like the LN that's too wide to fit in most dados seems to squander most of that utility. It seems like it would do one thing really, really well: trim glue lines. Not that a narrower chisel plane wouldn't do well at that too, your aim just has to be a bit better.

In the interests of full disclosure, I don't own either a chisel plane or a bullnose. I use a simple chisel for all the trimming operations where my ordinary planes can't handle. But of the two, it's a narrow bullnose with a removable nose piece that I crave. Four set screws accurately register the blade in the body, and it has a large thumb wheel for depth adjustment. Comes with a lapped O1 steel blade hardened to Rc58-60. The 20° bevel blade coupled with the 15° bed angle yields an effective cutting angle of 35°, severing end-grain fibers cleanly and minimizing tearing. Weighs 1.2 lb. A bullnose offers a similar advantage, only slightly less so, because there's a little bit of tool in front of the blade. The idea is you can clean up that last 1/4" or so with a chisel. Or where the front of the bullnose is removeable (like the Veritas), you get the best of both worlds: leave the front on to control tearout right up to the last, easily manageable 1/4", then pop off the nose to clean it up. If you get that LN chisel plane, you'll certainly have a beautiful and well-made tool, and will no doubt support my state's economy. But I'm not sure what this model will do for you that a narrow bullnose and your current tools won't.

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