Plane Flattening, Corrogated or Smooth?

[Malcolm Schweizer]

A few have commented on the corrugations not holding wax, but I thought the whole idea was that they put less metal on the wood, and therefore less friction.

[David Weaver]

That's the suggestion. I think the real issue is that halving the surface of metal (or whatever it may be) and making a corresponding increase in the amount of weight on each square inch of metal on the wood doesn't seem to make any difference.

One of the blog comments many years ago was that the corrugations were good for holding wax. Whether it originated on the forums and went to the blogs or originated on a blog and went to the forums, I don't know, but for a while people would make the comment "the corrugations are handy for holding wax".

Most of us have found that the implication of that (that the wax somehow makes it to the wood from a reservoir of wax held in the corrugations) just doesn't happen. And the idea that friction will be reduced by a fraction on the unwaxed metal doesn't seem to hold, either. What does is that the corrugations shred your bar of wax if you don't run the wax parallel to them.

There was a premium of a few bucks on corrugated planes back then, too, even for users. I think the assumption was that because an extra operation was done to them, they must be better.