david weaver
I guess we'll probably not ever know exactly why, though will have bits of stuff printed here and there that are clues. It won't be as clear as why the horse disappeared for transportation (not that that is even a similar argument).

My whole point in all of this is that I can't find a reason that it wouldn't have had something to do with surface quality, and i'm not sure that I agree that it takes less skill to use a double ironed plane - especially in difficult wood - if that were the case, they'd be the most popular thing for difficult wood, but as woodworking magazines and blogs go, most folks have been told plane it, plane it steeper, scrape it, sand it as a progression of things to do as wood gets more difficult.

And when I brought this up orginally before the kato and kawai stuff came up, I thought it was at the time at the very least novel and very effective, and an excellent option for someone who wants to learn the skill of planing but doesn't necessarily want to dump lots of money to get flawless or even good results.

I didn't bring it up to try to tell people that they shouldn't use single iron planes or shouldn't make their own infills or shouldn't buy premium infills. All of those planes work well, the point is more that a common inexpensive plane that was seen as a mediocre performer or something that took a lot of skill to use to get great results is actually much much better than that when it is set up properly, and other folks seem to be realizing that, too, and that the setup isn't that hard.

One wonders why, then, that knowledge was lost to a great proportion of users. Because it's clear that the double iron was recognized as a surface improvement device, regardless of whether or not that's the reason it was put on a plane in the first place. it's my opinion that the issue at least recently, is that most stuff is targeted toward beginners, and everything has to work on the first stroke out of the box or people will return it.

And the clear question that still comes to me is that double iron planes were not "cheap and common" when they took over, and they weren't even cheaper than a steeper pitch plane once they were, but most craftsmen still seem to have chosen them, anyway. They were more expensive. Why then was everyone willing to pay more for them in a time when craftsmen had very little disposable income.

The same question could be asked of infills. I noticed I think on your blog where you put up some text where someone was lamenting the social pressure to purchase an infill at great cost because it was expected of them.

I've never seen anything similar describing social pressure to purchase a double iron, though, and I guess I won't see anything as fact as long as double irons were more expensive, just like I can't prove that what I suspect is true. I can suppose what I think was likely, though, and that is that I think that skilled users (the only people who would've bought planes back then) found merit in paying more for a plane with two irons than they would've for a plane with one, pretty much universally.

If I want a more certain answer than that, I guess I'm going to have to call Bill and Ted.