Is getting a custom made profile cutter made expensive?
Yes (typically £70 to £100, based on current prices). Partly because it's a set (two profile cutters, two limiters)
its simple enough to grind the profile - and its circular cutting allowance when its used in a spindle.
steel, cutter blanks are available.
but the old Irwin(?) metal moulder planes are best for mixing and matching with their supplied custom cutters to achieve a near enough profile.
likewise you can router just about anything nowadays.
Irwin (or at least the original Irwin firm) never made planes at all - they were an auger bit manufacturer. Do you perhaps mean Record who made a copy of the Stanley 45 called a 405 multiplane? They were taken over by Irwin's parent firm in the 1990s, but by that time the 405 was long gone from the catalogue. The Stanley 45 was dropped from production in the early 1960s (?) whilst the Record survived until the 1970s. They were/are dreadful things to use, even for an experienced hand tool bench hand, and totally unusable for the vast majority of DIYers, I'd say. A pig to sharpen/hone, too. Which is probably why so many of them coming up at auction are complete and almost unused.
i know someone who restored his historic house and uses an old Stanley Combination Plane. It seems slow to me. He says nobody uses them any more.
I'm not surprised..... (see above). They were awkward and heavy to use and very hard work for anything, so small wonder that anyone who had a set of rounds, hollows and beaders would use those instead of a multiplane
back in the day.
as far as i know even large joinery shops dont use s/m's anymore.
???
IIRC I have done short run reproduction of Victorian mouldings a few times over the years for repairs using a router, round-over bits, core box bits, rebate bits, etc and also a block plane, spokeshave (optional) and shaped sanding blocks (this BTW on listed buildings where the Conservation Officer was keeping a beady eye on things). The problem is that it becomes really tedious to run 40 or 50 feet that way..... The fact is it's often far easier
and cheaper to find a near match moulding (or even two or more which can be combined to make one) and use that instead of getting an exact match
