Melbourne Tool Company Low Angle Block Plane Review (+ Giveaway!)
Wood Workers Workshop kindly supplied the plane for this review and giveaway.
We’re also giving away this plane to one lucky winner! Entry is completely free, and you’ll find the giveaway details and entry form at the bottom of this review 👉🏻 skip to the giveaway. Entries close at 12:00pm BST on Thursday 14th August 2026. This giveaway is open to UK residents aged 18 or over. Good luck!
Whether you’re adding chamfers, easing a sharp edge, or taking whisper thin shavings from end grain, a good block plane is one of those tools that quickly becomes a permanent fixture on the bench. We use ours constantly throughout the workshop, so when Wood Workers Workshop sent us the Melbourne Tool Company Low Angle Block Plane to try, we were keen to see how it performed.
After a full workshop setup, sharpening session and plenty of use on a variety of furniture making tasks, here’s what we found.
First impressions
Straight out of the box, the plane makes a great first impression. Presentation is smart and the tool immediately feels substantial in the hand.
At 165mm long and weighing just under 800g, it’s compact, but has a good weight to it. The cast body is nicely finished, the brass fittings are well made, and both the lever cap wheel and front adjustment wheel have a reassuringly smooth, positive action.
The machining also looked excellent. The sides appeared square enough for shooting board work, and a quick check across the sole showed it to be impressively flat.
Overall, it certainly gives the impression of a much more expensive tool than its price tag suggests.
Setting the plane up
Like any quality hand plane, this block plane will still benefit from a proper initial setup.
Rather than relying on workshop machinery, I deliberately sharpened the blade using our Scary Sharp system on float glass, as that’s a method many of our online students can easily replicate at home and it’s always interesting to see what they’re up against.
The blade arrived ground to the standard 25° primary bevel, but I always like to establish this myself before adding a 30° secondary bevel. In this case I was using the Veritas MKII honing guide.
Blade quality
The supplied blade is reassuringly thick and feels like it will provide many years of service.
Being M2 High Speed Steel, it does take a little longer to sharpen than other steels, but the trade off is excellent edge retention.
M2 can be a little less forgiving than A2 if mistreated, but for normal furniture making this shouldn’t present any issues, provided the blade is sharpened and maintained correctly.
Combined with the solid casting and quality brass fittings, the whole plane has a genuinely premium feel.
Because the factory grind was only fractionally different from my sharpening guide setup, it took just under 15 minutes on 100 micron Scary Sharp film to fully establish the primary bevel by hand. It would have only taken a few minutes, but one side of the blade dipped off very slightly, creating a little extra work to get the bevel fully established, but certainly not badly. I then added the secondary bevel.
15 minutes is still perfectly reasonable considering the blade is made from M2 High Speed Steel, which is noticeably harder than many traditional plane irons.
The result was an exceptionally keen edge ready for testing.
Fine adjustments
Reassembly is straightforward, and the adjustable mouth allows you to quickly fine tune the mouth opening using the adjustable throat locking knob. For most of my testing I set the mouth quite tight, ideal for taking fine shavings and working difficult grain – this is a 12° low angle block plane, making it particularly well suited to end grain work.
Blade depth is controlled via a Norris-style combined depth and lateral adjuster. It works well and provides accurate adjustment, although personally I still prefer to loosen the lever cap slightly and make fine lateral adjustments by hand. With smaller block planes, I find this gives a little more control and a more intuitive feel when aligning the blade, but it’s still a well-made component.
In use
This is simply a very comfortable plane to use.
For one-handed work, your palm naturally rests over the lever cap while your forefinger locates into the recess of the throat locking knob, giving excellent control when adding small chamfers or easing sharp edges.
Using two hands feels equally natural when tackling longer cuts.
One of the first tests was on the shooting board, where it produced clean, perfectly square end grain with surprisingly little effort. Although the blade width naturally limits it to smaller components, it’s more than capable of handling the kind of work.
The plane also excelled at flushing an edge and cleaning up awkward grain.
I tested it on a piece of oak straight from the bandsaw, removing the saw marks and leaving behind a beautifully clean surface despite some fairly lively grain.
Adding chamfers is, of course, exactly what a block plane is particularly good at. The compact body makes it easy to reference the bevel as it develops, and once you settle into the correct angle it happily produces those long, satisfying curly shavings, which we all enjoy doing!
Final thoughts
At just under £100, this plane sits well below premium offerings from Clifton, Lie-Nielsen and Veritas, yet doesn’t feel like a budget compromise at all. The machining is excellent, the build quality superb, and after sharpening it performed exactly as you’d hope a quality low angle block plane should.
For anyone looking for a quality block plane without stepping into premium price territory, this represents excellent value and is a tool I’d be very happy to have on my own bench.
🎉 Win This Plane!
Thanks to Wood Workers Workshop, we’re giving away this Melbourne Tool Company Low Angle Block Plane to one lucky winner.
Entering couldn’t be simpler:
- ‘Like’ the giveaway reel on either Instagram, Facebook or Tik Tok.
- Complete the entry form below, including your social media @username so we can verify your entry.
That’s it!
The winner will be selected at random after the closing date.
Good luck!
Entry closes on August 14th 2026, 12pm BST. This giveaway is open to UK residents aged 18 or over.
Please note: We will only ever contact the winner using the email address provided on the entry form. We will never ask for payment details or request personal information via social media. Personal information collected for any giveaway will be used solely for administering the competition and contacting the winner. Entrants will not be added to a marketing mailing list or receive marketing emails as a result of entering the giveaway.
Summer Special — Complete Online Course Offer:
If you’re inspired to spend more time at the workbench this summer, we’re also running a Summer Special on our Complete Online Course.
For a limited time, it’s available for £110 (normally £149), and a one-time purchase gives you complete access to all our available furniture making projects, plans and tutorials.
Offer ends 31st August.
Happy making!
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