I did what Derek Cohen and George Wilson suggest here to an extremely pitted iron a couple of years back.
The plane was my grandfather's so I was keen to get it working with the original parts.
It is harder to push, and the chip breaker is far from the cutting edge, but it works well.
Like most of you I have a number of orphaned plane blades in the back of a drawer.
Are they good for making scrapers? Are there other interesting uses someone has come up with for them?