Stewart Spiers

Like the Glasgow firm of Alexander Mathieson & Sons, Spiers benefited hugely from the thriving industries on the Firth of Clyde in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

This supposedly was the beginning of what soon became a successful operation in which he was selling his planes in Glasgow and Edinburgh and as far afield as North America, yet this was still little more than a sideline to his cabinet-making.

A pivotal role in the firm's destiny was played by William McNaught from shortly before the turn of the twentieth century possibly until the 1920s.

[8] He almost certainly had a hand in the experimental work that took place at the workshop in the face of competition from the mass-produced cheaper American models flooding the market.

Some early Plane-O-Ayr smoothing, panel and jointing planes were fitted with a rudimentary mechanism providing vertical adjustment.

During the First World War, Spiers made utilitarian models of the Plane-O-Ayr jointers with beech fittings and cast-iron lever caps.

The Spiers sisters decided to sell the business and in 1922 found a buyer in John McFadyen, a ship's engineer, but retained ownership of the premises at 2−4 River Terrace.

Such an assertion is somewhat exaggerated, but nevertheless it is without doubt that he contributed to the perfecting of metal planes, a legacy the firm continued to build on right up to its demise.