The Stanley #55 At Work. Leitz Summicron 50mm DR

Some months back, I acquired a venerable Stanley #55 Combination Plane from a seller on the Big Auction site.  It was in awful cosmetic condition, but all the bits were there, and it worked.  I put some elbow grease into cleaning it up.  It is never going to be in showroom condition, but it's vastly improved now.  Today, I set it to work making a nice chunky molding which will surround the square end of the repurposed harpsichord case.  In my lumber stash, I found a suitable piece of fine, straight-grained mahogany, perfect for a big molding.
The #55 is unique in that one of its skates - those two thin,vertical pieces of steel -, can be adjusted up and down.  The adjuster is that long, skinny shaft in the background. The skates guide the cutter as it slides across the work piece, ensuring that it can't dig into the wood.  It's not completely clear from the image, but the profile of this molding is a sigma curve, a big bead at the one side, and a little quirk on the other.  The Extra shows the profile straight from the plane.  The cutter for the sigma needs the vertically-adjustable skate.  As you can see, the one is lower than the other.  On the left is the rosewood fence which guides the plane along the piece of wood.
There is definitely a learning curve with this beast - it weighs about 10 lbs and needs some pushing around -,  but the clean results are immediately evident.  Let's have a round of applause for old-fashioned technology!