Mark Hennebury
Hi Wiley,

I will have to agree with Bill on this point. The throat aperture needs to be small to work to its best.
A larger opening could of course ad some control in respect to tearout in some grain situations and shaving sizes, but generally my opinion would be that it need to be very close to shaving thickness for it to function as we have all be talking about since the video was posted.

The Japanese planes with the two lines of contact make sense for reducing friction and easy to maintain a flat reference, and to a lesser degree putting some pressure ahead of the blade, but the relief of the "after the blade portion" or outfeed table would seem to be incorrect...in theory. ( dont throw rocks at me)

From a strictly theoretical standpoint a flat sole as in western handplanes is incorrect also.

A handplane should be setup like a motorised jointer planer machine.

It should have an infeed and an outfeed table.
The blade should always be set at the the level of the outfeed table. Maybe plus a bit for springback.
The infeed table should adjust vertically the thickness of the shaving and horizontally the width of the shaving. This adjustment between the vertical and horizontal would be a fixed relationship, so that when you adjusted for a shaving of any thickness the table would move both up and out to maintain the
correct relationship. On a machine jointer to take a 1/16" cut the blade is set at TDC of the outfeed table, and the infeed table is lowered 1/16" The wood passes over the infeed table hits the cutter, has 1/16" removed and is fully suported by the outfeed table.

Of course a handplane is only taking very small shavings of a couple of thou so the situation is a litte more forgiving, plus there are a few micro variables such as fiber springback and plane sole flex.

If you look at a drawing of a western style plane taking a shaving you will note ; that the front sole (or infeed table)rests on the wood, the blade protrudes below the sole the thickness of the shaving, as you push the plane to make the shaving the rear sole or outfeed table has a gap the thickness of the shaving. So a western plane is never sitting / riding flat. Which kind of eliminates the whole reason for a flat sole. If you plane a 0.010 shaving you would theoretically have 0.010 gap under the rear sole of the plane.

But planes both Western and Eastern styles still seems to work pretty well with all of the imagined theoretical engineering flaws.