Camber on a High Angle Plane Blade

[John Crawford]

Hi Everyone:

I'm working on setting up a blade for a high-angle smoothing plane. This is the wooden Mujingfang plane, which beds the blade at around a 60 degree angle. It is a bevel down plane, and I have the blade with a 35 degree microbevel.

I typically add a small bit of camber to the irons of my ordinary Stanley type smoothing planes.

Would you camber a high angle blade like the Muji? My imagination tells me that raising the blade to the high angle would require less camber. Would you just skip cambering on this kind of plane? My only motivation here is to leave a finished surface with no tracks.

Thanks for your advice. This is a very hard blade; testing it out with various configurations would be really time consuming, so I'd be interested in hearing what others of you do.

[Derek Cohen]

You still need camber, just less of it.

Regards from Perth

Derek