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But on a really old style thick iron, you might have to be very brave to do that, I can’t tell. I mean, even if they weren’t that brittle it could take considerable force to actually alter the flatness. However, for all I know a similar approach might sometimes be used on Japanese plane irons, so it might work nevertheless. Just depends on the way you’re doing it and on the actual material, I guess. I think I will try this out, but up to now I got almost everything flat with a very coarse diamond plate, also old English jointer plane irons and such. I don’t like the Eze Laps too much for that, although they’re great for bevel sharpening. I had some flatness issues with one of those plates. DMT offers some even coarser grits at about 120. The dia-flat lapping plates I’ve tried were always good and flat, although not all of the finer DMTs were. But no deviation to worry about there. I recently came across those Tsuboman Atoma plates from Japan with the stick on thin plates on an aluminium base. I avoided those first because of that, but truth is the one I have now (140 grit) is dead flat and it cuts very fast on the backs of blades, might be due to their distinct pattern (much denser than the DMT dots). All my coarse stones wore down a little quicker than the fine ones and I’ve had the Atoma only for a very short, so I don’t know about it. It looks promising for now, so I guess, if the hammering is not successful I would recommend a very coarse diamond plate like that.
I can recommend that one as well. However, I only use it for exremely heavy removal. I haven’t actually measured, but on some occasions I must have taken off around 3mm with one pass. As far as I can remember the blade came with a pretty pronounced camber originally. First I thought I would like to have it just a little slighter, but I kind of went back to an even stronger camber I think. So this is for hogging off really a lot. For standard scrubbing I have turned to an old German style wooden smoothing plane. It was completely beat up and had a very open mouth, so I tuned it for a scrub. Nice thing about wooden planes for this amount of material removal is the light weight. It can’t beat Veritas of course when it comes to real hard work, but if you do a lot of work like that I can recommend following up with it. Have fun with your Veritas scrub, anyway! It’s a great plane. Enjoy!
I don’t know if the discussion has maybe already come to a conclusion, but I would still like to add that the kind of leather you use makes a big difference. I have used vegetable-tanned goat leather to start with. That stuff is very thin, but robust. You can almost feel the substrate material through it. The problem I had with it, was the high friction I got with the compound on (worse on the smooth side). In general I find a rougher and harder piece of leather slightly better, because the blades won’t stick so much with the compound on there. Most varieties of combound I’ve used were very soft and therefore I changed to vegetable-tanned cow-leather and stuck it with some stronger adhesive. I now got less sticking of the blades to the strop. I would still like to try sheep leather. It is about as thin as the goat leather, but harder for all I know. I’ve heard people recommend it for polishing knives and so. I’ve had the experience with the harder polishing compounds the abrasion is a bit slower, but I get no sticking on any kind of leather I’ve tried. I find stropping on wood also gets very good results, but it is not so efficient and you might need to clean off the strop more often.
You must have been doing some work. Getting a sole flat takes some time in the first place, even on a No. 4, for all I know. However, really getting it out of perpendicular with the tote must have taken considerably more work. Can it be that the sole was warped before? If so, I could imagine it being more prone to having taken down one of the high spots more than another in that case. Due to the smaller surface area of a very warped sole in contact with the abrasive, it might also result in a thicker layer of iron being abraded to start with. If that abrasion has for some reason occured to be uneven, that’s what I could imagine.
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