Hand planes form a large percentage of the woodworking tools in the MacLachlan Woodworking Museum’s collection. The large number of planes in the collection today is the result the interests of the staff and museum’s board of directors throughout the 1990s. Most were either donated or purchased from long time collectors. The current collection held by the City includes the personal collections of several donors - the Robert Westley collection contains over 1500 planes, many of which are from Quebec, while the Ivor Blower donation contained 300+ planes from Ontario. Recently surpassed in number of planes by other collections, for almost 20 years the MacLachlan Woodworking Museum held the largest public collection of Canadian hand planes.
