HNT Gordon & Co. Classic Plane Makers Australia

HNT Gordon and Co. Classic Plane Makers Australia was established by Terry Gordon in 1995 after several years of development work. Terry was a keen woodworker and navigator in the Air Force when he decided to follow his passion in the woodwork industry. Hand plane problems were a constant struggle in his woodwork projects, so he set out to find different alternatives and new designs. After living in Malaysia for 3 years with the air force, he began to meet the locals and observed them using their planes with balance and ease to produce a tear out free surface. These Asian style planes intrigued Terry, and he went on to learn about the benefits of these tools. In addition to this, large amounts of studying old tools and lots of experimental work was conducted on blade angles to determine what worked best on Aussie hard woods. It was found that a blade pitch of 55 – 60 degrees works best on hard and curly grain and by reversing the blade to bevel up an angle of 85 – 90 degrees forms a scraper plane to tackle those woods you can’t plane. This high blade pitch was not being produced by any manufacturers at the time, which is what made our planes unique when we came on the market.

We are now a team of five who manufacture over 50 types of hand planes and vices for beginners to experienced hobbyists and professionals. 

We are located 25 minutes from Byron Bay Australia in a village called Alstonville.  We invite you to visit us at our workshop - however it is best to call ahead to ensure someone is available as we travel at certain times of the year for wood shows.  

 At HNT Gordon & Co. our Business principles are:

• All our bench planes will plane and scrape difficult timbers with no tear out, and they are optimised for hard/cranky timbers but will work equally well on soft wood.
• We will only use high quality materials with a simple/functional design to offer customers affordable quality in tools to help improve your woodwork. 
• We have done considerable development work to learn how to harvest, dry and stabilise Australian hardwoods (in particular gidgee) to give us a superior quality wood for plane making that has ever been used before. In conjunction with this we have learnt how to combine this wood with brass using modern glues to enhance the function and life of some wooden planes.
• As a consequence of this work we offer an unconditional guarantee on workmanship and materials without hesitation.

In today’s throwaway society, we are proud to produce a quality product that will last generations. Too often today we are seeing cheap, poor quality imported products ending up as landfill after only a short period of service. This is not good for our environment, and we endeavour to make a difference. At HNT Gordon we do a yearly run to collect timber from inland Australia, and we are exceptionally selective about the trees we cut down to reduce waste.