Re: kanna, shoulda, coulda
TomD
What kind of performance are you looking for? Generally comments like yours refer to finer shavings. If so what are you getting? Or is it a mater of edge retention.
The first or second Japanese plane I made back in the early 80s, was made from a cheap scraper blade (I couldn't get that one to work as a scraper, my fault). I put it loosely in a white oak body, and it took shavings about 4 tens, which I politely got called a liar for here, decades later. Nobody seemed to think it was possible. It was not a good plane, nor was it well made, it required significant shims to make it work. I still have it. Now everyone gets those numbers, it seems, and a lot of planes come from the box ready to perform.
I don't know what thickness of shaving people are getting today, with all the info and relationships with suppliers we never had back then. But I can't really imagine what the practicality would be if they got planes that would take 2 tens.
What I am getting at is if some simple fundamentals are correct, even a cheap piece of junk will turn out great work. You obviously got your fundamentals right in the first plane.
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The one thing in your description that stood out is the twisted sole. If you had to remove so much material from the sole that you couldn't get the plane blade to seat properly, that can make it difficult to get a blade that seats reliably, but that would be too obvious. Sounds like you are too experienced to fall for that. I struggled with that a lot in various situation, because either I tried to rough too near to final fit; I didn't initially set the blade hard enough; or I was dealing with planes that I had worn out and needed to resole.
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For planes designed to take a fine shaving, but mysteriously it is not happening, the main pitfalls are:
- blade not sharp enough or edge misshapen. These are pretty mechanical issues if one is using (or checking) with a guide;
- Bottom not flat enough. The glass and sandpaper trick is a "cheat", but very effective. That is how I do it.
- Wave shape is not right, this does not have to be pretty, I have blown out everything between two contact patches with a power router. It was a test, it worked fine. Subtly scraped surfaces are nice, just so long as you get the relief. Also be sure to relieve the outfeed, unless it is a jointer plane. At least that is what I do with smoothing planes. Also the relief should start from the mouth, no support to the cut past the mouth.
- All the sole factors above got knocked out of true when you drove the blade in.
- Set the plane up without the sub-blade. See how that goes. You can change settings/tolerances with the sub-blade. Or you can drive it over the end of the blade. With clean wood the sub-blade isn't doing much, particularly when the shavings are so fine they don't generate tear-out. You know those shaving that look like a pile of dust, but when pulled out there are a complete shaving, they don't have the structure to chip out the surface.
- It might just be the photo, but the planes look kinda long. Extra length makes it harder to get the set-up on a polishing plane just right.
All that stuff is pretty obvious, it really just comes down to well known factors involved in a kind of blueprinting. So you probably know all that stuff, given all the sources out there. As with most things, the fundamentals are the key.
