This is where I started. My first infill plane was an early unhandled Spiers coffin smoother that I knew nothing about, and knocked my socks off as soon as I tried it. These planes are based on the work of Stewart Spiers and Alex Mathieson with a dash of Thomas Norris (most notably the No.7 shoulder plane). I took what I felt were the best touches from each of them and blended them together. In the beginning, the learning curve was pretty much a vertical line, so I had no intention of reinventing the plane – learning how to make a good one was a big enough challenge. I wanted to learn and understand why an infill plane worked the way it did, and why they were designed the way they were. There was no better place to start than drawing inspiration for the original infill plane makers. At the time, the pie in the sky goal was to someday make a plane as well as they did.