I started making planes in the late 1990s. At the time, I was a struggling grad student and part-time machinist, and making tools seemed like a sensible solution to the problem of wanting nice things but not being able to afford them.

My earliest planes were laminated, “Krenov-style” planes, but I was never really satisfied with that approach, so I began to research traditional British/ American planes and planemaking methods. At some point, I realized that just about all the problems in planemaking had been solved a couple centuries ago, and there was no point in trying to reinvent the wheel.

As luck would have it, my immersion into traditional planemaking coincided with a resurgence of interest among woodworkers in the use of double-iron planes. Most custom planemakers build single-iron planes, but I gradually became convinced that British-style double-iron planes of the type found in the Seaton toolchest, ca. 1796, represented the peak of the planemakers art, at least as far as bench planes were concerned. Observing that no one was making these planes, I resolved to do something about the situation, and in August 2015 I founded Voigt Planes.
Today, I build these traditional double-iron planes in my small shop in the Lehigh Valley. They are bespoke planes, made one at a time. I use a few basic power tools for rough dimensioning, but the vast majority of work is done by hand, much as it would have been 200 years ago.