Aaaaaggghh! Plane ding.
Kelby
>I'm a little frustrated.
Last week at the woodworks show in Pomona, I bought a Lie Nielsen 4-1/2. Great. But they were out of them at the show, and said they would ship it to me. Fine.
Today it arrived. I open the package and dutifully hone the blade before using, so that the first shavings are nice. After a couple minutes I can easily shave with it, I put it in the plane and take my first shavings from my workbench-in-progress.
Hmmmm. Something's wrong. Barely getting any shaving, but there's a deep scratch in the wood. Yikes. Right there at the corner of the sole and the sides, there's a big gouge. (I'll try to attach pictures below.)
Well, I know it wasn't me. I ding my tools from time to time, but I was super careful here. It went straight from the box to the wooden surface of my bench, and the plane body never touched anything else.
Sooo, here's my dilemma. Of course I could send it back and demand a replacement. And I would be waiting a couple weeks to get it.
Or I could just flatten it out and live with it.
Now normally, I'm not one of the fussbudgets that freaks out if my tools aren't pretty. To me, dropping something on the concrete and getting it dinged up generally means nothing more than I now have to spend a few minutes fixing it. And truth be told, if I had put the ding in the sole on this plane, it really wouldn't bother me. I figure that before the year is out I will probably drop it more than a few times and there will be plenty of dings in it in my lifetime.
But on the other hand, I didn't put the ding in it. This is the first time I have spent over $300 for a handplane, and it should be right.
So I am torn. I can either ask for a new one, and be without it for another couple weeks, or I can flatten the sole and move on, knowing that my $300 plane came from the factory with a customized ding.
What would you do?
