Bill Tindall

There are these planing machines called SuperSurfacers. Other than being powered by electricity vs human they work like a hand plane. Because all the planing variables can be precisely set and controlled they provide a dandy way to study planing. So for example if one wants to know the effect of setting the cap iron 0.002" closer to the blade tip, that is easily accomplished. Of if one wants to study the wear of this knife steel vs that knife steel it is no sweat to reproducibly plane a thousand feet with each blade and watch the effect of them getting duller(high performance steels last 3X longer). Much more on these results later.....

A person running one of these machines told me to achieve a similar surface quality that this machine's equivalent of hand plane cap-iron, shaving thickness and throat opening all had to be readjusted when the wood being planed was changed . Distance of the cap-iron from the blade tip was a very important variable to achieve surface quality.