In reading the discussion about iron/bronze planes, I found the observation that weight in a hand plane is a good thing. With relatively little experience here, I'm guessing that the added weight brings the benefit of inertia to move the plane through a point of resistance in a cut. Is that correct?
This, of course, leads to another question. I'm in the middle of making three Krenov style planes--a rock maple jointer, and two cherry smoothers with thick maple soles. I realize I might have done better to reverse my wood selection, but these were some old scraps that worked better this way. If added mass is good, would it make any sense to drill a couple holes in the cherry smoothers before glue up, and fill them with lead? This seems a bit silly and overthought to me, but, what the heck, I thought I'd ask anyway.
Now for what it's worth, David Fink describes maple and oak as likely choices for a plane blank, but writes that cherry is not heavy enough for the smaller planes (why couldn't I just listen?). With the smoothers coming in at less than half a board foot of material, and using some suspect information I found off the internet (I'm away from home now--no library), I seem to come up with a rough difference in weight between maple and cherry of 5 oz. (maple 1.7675 lbs/cherry 1.447 lbs).
I have a walnut (another no no, I know, I know) smoother I made last year. I like it a lot. If I can only get the mouth tighter on these...