David Charlesworth's suggestion
Frank Mutchler in Colorado Springs
>about tuning a plane blade for wild wood:
I would try a narrow bevel on the flat side of a regular bench plane blade. 1/64 to 1/32" should be plenty.
This fools the wood into thinking we have a steeper pitched plane.
This is equivalent to using, a steeper honing angle on a low angle plane.
In either case we wish to raise the "effective pitch" to somewhere between 60 degrees and in extreme cases" 75 degrees.
I find a 25 degree back bevel on a bench plane blade will deal with almost all difficult, hard, timbers.
The shavings taken must be kept very fine, or the trick will not work and tearout will result.
These methods are based on Bruce Hoadley's type 2 chip production.
David
www.davidcharlesworth.com
I picked up a new Record 4� a couple weeks ago intending to see how useful that plane might be given P. Leech's speculation that It was introduced to compete with the popular infill smoothers of that day. So, I honed the blade, including a 25� back bevel as David suggested and put the plane to a piece of roey African Mahonany. The plane almost completely tamed the reversing grain. It was set for a very light cut with a .004--.005 mouth.
Examining the shavings produced, I concluded that they are very similar to those made by my LV scraper plane. Not too surprising considering that the cutting angle of the 4� should be about 70�. Now, my setup was done quickly and my honing of the blade could be improved upon but I was curious to verify David's basic premise. I've done so to my satisfaction. As soon as Lyn receives the sample wood I'm sending him he will, I'm quite certain, approach this in a much more refined way.
Incidently, the same approach is advocated by Leonard Lee in "The Complete Guide To Sharpening".