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Hi all,

I've got a book on sharpening; "The complete guide to sharpening" by Leonard Lee, http://www.leevalley.com/wood/page.aspx?c=1&p=32991&cat=1,46096,46109&ap=2.

In the section on setting up and truing the plane it says that the bed of the plane (including the edge of the mouth) should form a continuous plane surface. Makes sense, but I was under the impression that the adjustable frog was so that you could move the entire blade forward thereby closing the mouth. If you do this to make the mouth smaller (for finer shavings) then the bed of the frog will stand proud of the edge of the mouth.

My plane (stanley smoothing plane) seems to only work well when the frog is lined up with the edge of the mouth. I had a frustrating planing experience this morning working the top of the headstock into a nice flat plane. Actually it came from the jointer nearly perfect except for minute tear out. It seemed when trying to clean it up with the plane that either the plane would skim over the wood making a slight scraping sound, or then dig into the wood taking a substantially thick shaving. I could not adjust the depth of cut to get a nice fine shaving.

I suspect I'm going to have to do more work truing the plane. I did it before using a table saw bed with emery paper. However, I've since read in "Double Bevel sharpening" by Brian burns that a jointer or table saw surface is likely not flat enough. Also, though I did the operation with the blade, and cap etc tightened down, I did not put any lock seal in the screw that the cap grasps down on, so subsequently the screw might have turned a bit, meaning different stress on the body of the plane and different deformation in the plane bottom.

Tweaking tools to perfection is very frustrating for me.

Thanks for any advice

Stefan

Not completely sure about this but using a thicker, stiffer aftermarket blade/chip breaker may solve your problem: The only way I see there being a problem with the frog not being aligned with the back of the mouth is if it is causing your blade to flex when used.