Japanese plane sole conditioning?

[Tony Shea]

I have finally bit the japanese plane bullet lately and just received my first one a few days ago. It came from Stu, a Tsunesaburo 70mm Meimon. It sure is a beauty and will post pics soon once I get it working the way I want. I also recently payed for another Tsunesaburo over on ebay, haven't yet received this one.

My question is regaurding sole conditioning. I've seen a few discussions over the net about this and am curious what people around here feel is the best method for a smoother. It is reccomended that two contact points is the preferred method for a smoother/roughing plane. One at the toe(back of a japanese plane) and one in front of the blade while the area behind the blade is relieved slightly. Seems odd to me but sorta makes some sense. It actually came with it very close to this condition although seems to be moving a bit as it gets acclimated to my shop, which it probably needs to do for another good 2 weeks.

What methods of sole conditioning are reccomended here? Im just so used to flat sole on all my western planes that I don't really dare follow this odd advise quit yet.

[David Weaver]

On my smoothers, I relieved the entire rear of the plane with a small LN scraping plane - there's no reason to dump $100 more on a specialized japanese scraper if you have anything at all that you can scrape with. I leave contact points in front of the mouth and at the very front of the plane, and then relieve the distance between them with the scraping plane, not deeply, just enough to see that when the plane is in use, only the contact points are being burnished from running over the surface being planed.

After all of that, I take a couple of very light passes over 400 grit 3x paper on a granite reference plate to make sure the two contact points are absolutely coplanar, and then I brush/vacuum the dust off of the contact points and the bottom of the plane and apply a little bit of paste wax.

I have seen some borderline religious stuff about not ever using sandpaper, etc, over the accusation that there will be grit left that will damage the surface that you plane. If it damages anything, it will dull the iron. I have never seen any evidence of loose grit (not on the iron, nor on the planed surface), and there is no way you can get a surface as flat by hand (scraping) as you can with 400 grit paper on a granite reference surface - which also removes very little wood.

Opinionated, yes, but doing that is quick and precise.

[Pam Niedermayer]

I flatten the dai blank before anything else, then cut away, never touching the high points (for a smoother, in front of the mouth and at the toe ONLY, the forward most part of the plane, closest to the body of the planer, and also the entire sole behind the mouth). Of course, a dai needs touching up later, but I mostly do the same, flatten the whole thing and take away. Note that when you're scraping the sole, make sure the blade is mounted. You'll often see rulers with a small cutout for the edge, but you can make your own from a regular steel ruler.

My guess is that Stu may have sent you a pre-adjusted plane.

Pam

[Wilbur Pan]

I have a write up of how I set up a Japanese plane from scratch here (http://giantcypress.net/tagged/Japanese%20plane%20setup). From beginning to end, it's just about 30 minutes of tuning, and no special tools are really needed.

Don't worry too much about the sole setup. It really doesn't take much skill. If you can flatten a board and use a card scraper, you can do this.