mark Hennebury
Hi Derek,
There has been a lot of flap over this "new found chip bender effect" the past month.
Many people seem to approach things with preconceived ideas and seek to confirm those. Many have chosen their plane styles and touted their opinions as facts for many years. Wood cutting is not opinion its physics, not Japanese Style or infil or single iron or double or whatever.

Lets review what we are trying to achieve: cleanly cut surface, with no tearout.
From a logical perspective:

Blades are wedges, bed angle increase the wedge affect, tearout is created by the wedging effect of the shaving ahead of the cutting edge. From a strictly observational point of view, the lowest possible bed angle and the lowest possible bevel grind angle would seem to get the blade tip in to cut the would fibers the best. It would also seem that coupled with a close throat that pressed down on the shaving and a close chip breaker would make the most sense.
If you look at the pictures from the Kato video it would lead me to believe that the most important part of preventing tearout would be the part that is not in the video, the leading edge of the throat opening.

So to me its important to have a lapped and polished plane sole, with a cleanly filed and polished throat edge just ahead of the knife, this edge should also be filed to form a vee on the inside with the bed angle, so that you have shaving clearance with the chipbreaker up really close to the tip. You throat looks to be square from the picture , although i cant be sure as i cant see it really well. The leading edge of the throat should be pressing down on the wood to hold it from lifting when the blade is cutting.

It would seem to me that a high angle bed is going in the wrong direction, and would seem to me to be pushing and scraping the wood more than cutting. And although it may not cause tearout it is probably not going to give you as good a surface.

So looking at this from a logical, observational perspective, high bed angle never made any sense to me.

Having used supersurfacers and handplanes for many years,I am quite sure that low bed angle works quite well. So its not just an opinion without any backup.