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Tsunesaburo 70mm Miki Smoothing Plane

Sale price$459.00

Most plane blades ask you to choose between edge retention and ease of sharpening. The Miki does not. Tsunesaburo built this plane around Hitachi Metals YSS powder high-speed steel — a composite blade that holds its edge through hardwoods, laminates, and composite materials where standard carbon steels would require repeated stops at the whetstone. The base iron is sourced from Izumo sand iron, a material drawn from Shimane Prefecture and long regarded among Japanese smiths for the purity that distinguishes it from industrial alternatives. At a tempering temperature of 550 degrees, the cutting edge will not lose its temper under a grinder — a durability that matters most to those who use a plane daily rather than occasionally. The 70mm blade is seated in a white oak dai cut to 9 sun 5 bu, forged in Miki City by the Tsunesaburo workshop.

Front view of a Tsunesaburo Miki 70mm smoothing plane showing a white oak dai body with a black-finished blade, a small label reading special powder steel above the blade mouth, and the Miki series label affixed to the lower body.
Tsunesaburo 70mm Miki Smoothing Plane Sale price$459.00

Meet the Artisan

Tsunesaburo

Tsunesaburo was founded in 1947 in Miki City, Hyogo Prefecture, when Uozumi Tsunemi, known as the original Tsunesaburo, established Tsunesaburo Kanna Manufacturing Studio after 28 years of study under his grandfather, a master plane-maker known as Fukusaburo Kanna. That grandfather had apprenticed at 13 to Kurokawa Utaro, a former sword smith, and absorbed the forging methods of Japanese swordcraft before redirecting them to plane blades. The lineage was built on that transfer. Uozumi Akio, the second generation, began learning at 13 alongside the studio's founding and spent 70 years at the forge, combining classical tempering with modern steel research into what the family holds as a guiding principle: that ancient and contemporary techniques are not in tension but in conversation. The current generation, led by Uozumi Toru as president, has extended that thinking into planes made from steels ranging from Meiji and early Showa period stock to modern high-speed alloys including HAP powder steel. For Tsunesaburo, the plane is inseparable from the Japanese built environment, and every blade that leaves the forge carries with it the expectation that a craftsman's work, and the spaces it produces, should be worthy of the steel.