Vintage Catalogue Ads – A Valuable Resource

Sometimes when tracking down lines of products it can be hard to find out what exactly was made as things get lost over time. Even using the interwebs it can be difficult if you don’t know what you’re doing. There are still things out there from days gone by that can be of great use to collectors for many different things, in this case, the Defiance line of planes. Old catalogue adverts.

While browsing the interwebs I came across several of these and tracked them down, many of them can also be purchased as high-res scans from various sites but for my purposes I don’t really need them and I don’t see the need to pay $20.00+ for a single page from an old catalogue.

In the images below you can pick out the various Defiance planes scattered among the other planes along with their corresponding numbers, there’s even a picture to give you a rough idea of what they look like and in some cases the measurements for the plane itself and the width of the iron.

The length of the plane and the width of the iron are two important numbers that can help identify a plane and separate a 1203 from a 1204 as the 1203 has a 1 3/4″ iron and the 1204 has a 2″ iron. Be nice if more people on sites like eBay would include this information instead of just the length of the plane. But I digress, check out these great old catalogue pages from the days of old, perhaps they will help you. Just click on an image below to open it up so you can see it better.


11/24/2022 Addition: Recently I was able to acquire a larger number of vintage catalog and inserts for Stanley tools. Rather than break them down to just the Defiance or Eclipse lines, I have opted to leave them intact so there are anywhere from 3 to 12 pages for each catalog. I was not skilled enough to add any sort of catalog separation so it’s just one continuous PDF file. Use the headers on the individual pages to determine you location. Anyhow, enough gilding the lily, here’s the link to the PDF, just click on the image below and you should be able to access or download it depending on how you have your browser setup.


Another important find was this diagram which shows an exploded view of a plane. This is kind of neat in that it really shows you all the parts of a plane, what it’s called, the part number, etc.. For a newcomer this would be a great help in learning what things are, where they go, what to look for when buying a plane and more.

And finally, I also found this little gem on the interwebs, it appears to be a chart listing what parts are interchangeable with other planes. How cool is that ?!?!?

So as you can see, just in these few pages alone, there is a plethora of valuable information not only for the Defiance line but many others.