Hello again,

Many thanks to you both (YrHenSaer and Ed) for taking the time to help with this – very much appreciated!

I checked the sole and the alignment seems OK overall – certainly within tolerance for someone at my skill level (see photo). The only two areas showing signs of wear are the back of one of the pointed sections/runners (not sure of the correct technical term) which has worn down about 1-2mm – well away from the mouth and I would imagine this could be compensated for (to some degree) by keeping the front of the plane down when making a pass and the guide face/fence (again, not sure of the correct term) – next to the ‘I’ stamp on the final photo and corresponding to the vertical spring line (?) which registers correctly on the very corner but leaves room for more play than I’ve experienced on other similar planes. I’m not sure if this second problem needs to/could be corrected (and the best way to go about it if so) or if it just requires a steady hand until the rest of the cutter starts to bite, but even so I would be surprised if either of these issues would cause the dire results I’ve achieved so far – I would’ve been better off using my teeth!!

With the above in mind I turned my attention to the blade – no engineer’s blue I’m afraid so I attached some masking tape to the back of the blade and was able to draw a fairly accurate line with a sharp pencil (see photo). I intend to trim the tape to the line with a scalpel and use that as a guide when grinding. As you can see there are a couple of areas that need quite a bit of reshaping so I hope that will improve matters.

That’s as far as I’ve got so far – I’ll send more photos as I progress, any further comments or advice much appreciated.

Thanks again,

Carl