Re: More factors
Lyn J. Mangiameli
>All the earlier comments have been right on. I'd just add that for a given wood the actual effort is a factor of blade width and blade extension, as well as effective cutting angle. It is also mitigated by plane mass and grip.
Blade width is obvious. You are taking a big bite with the wide blade in most jack planes, and thus greater resistance. This is partially mitigated by the greater mass of jack planes and heavier smoothers, which is one reason even in the Jack plane size the heavy LV version feels a bit better to use with very high effective cutting angles than the lighter L-N version. Lighter planes, like most woodies, do better with high effective cutting angles if their blades are two inches or less.
Blade extention is obvious for much the same reasons. Greater blade extension again means a bigger bite. If you are going to be clearing away a lot of wood in each stroke, you want the lowest effective cutting angle you can get by with consistent with edge retention. On the flip side, when high effective cutting angles are most desirable is for final finishing when very light cuts are taken. Those light cuts reduce the bite and thus the resistance. Thus the take home here is you want a smoother and a jointer capable of providing high effective cutting angles, but you want lower angles for more general dimensioning work.
As touched on above, having a heavier plane will allow you to develop more momentum on your forward stroke. This will allow for longer forward strokes and allow you to plow through areas of varying resistance easier than lighter planes. However, quite light woodies work very well at extremely high effective cutting angles, particularly if they are pulled.
So for me the matter is not that high effective cutting angles are universally better, but rather than one be able to have a choice of effective cutting angles and match the angle to the task at hand.