Jim Koepke's recent post about a way to make a stopped groove using a combination plane (thanks, Jim!) got me thinking about other possible alternative uses for tools in general and the combination plane in particular.
When I start a mortise, I always have to take a little bit of time lining up the chisel's edge to the marks I made with my mortise gauge. It doesn't take long, but a little bit of time lining things up before each starting chop does add up.
So, it occurs to me that I could use my combination plane with a blade matching my chisel to make a shallow stopped groove (no modifications needed to the plane's typical plow set up) that matches my intended mortise and lets me chop the mortise more quickly and accurately. Setting the fence on the combination plane should take me about as long as setting my mortise gauge, and one or two passes should do it. Even if the chisel and combination plane blade aren't perfectly matched, it should still work fine as long as they're reasonably close. Someone else must have already come up with this (after all, it's effectively the mortise-in-groove from frame-and-panel construction) and maybe it's even common knowledge, but I can't say I've ever read anything about such a trick so I thought it worth posting.
Thoughts? Am I over-complicating this? Other ideas for outside the box uses of tools that I probably haven't considered?
Thanks in advance.