Quote Originally Posted by pampelmuse View Post
Seems like the closeness to the blade edge could be the issue. I put it real close just so I could get maximum adjustment on the blade.
PM, yes, you did have it set very tight, judging by the pics. You can go close when taking very, very fine shavings, but for reasonably thick shavings it needs to be set back a bit more. I discovered this for myself when I first started reading about tuning planes a goodly while ago. I massaged my cap irons to perfection & set them with just a whisker of blade protruding, & got concertina shavings that jammed in the throat, just as you did.

In the North American press, they still insist on calling the cap-iron a 'chip breaker'. The received wisdom is/was that it bends the shaving & breaks the fibres, preventing splintering ahead of the blade. So the dogma was to set the 'chip breaker' as close as possible to the cutting edge. I think a few people have since adequately demonstrated that that just isn't correct, in most instances. For starters, how come planes can work just as well without a cap-iron in sight? But you will notice that cap-iron-less plane blades are (much!)thicker than your average work-a-day Stanley blade. I think most people have now come to accept that the main function of the cap-iron is to pre-tension that thin blade to prevent chatter as it hits harder & softer bits in the wood it is running over. In fact, the cap-iron can often be more of an obstruction to the exit of shavings, & better out of their way as far as possible. How far out of the way you can set it is a matter of experiment. It depends on the thickness of your blade, what wood you are planing, and the frog geometry. If you set it too far back you will not get sufficient tension on the blade & you'll start to get chatter. But it can often go a fair ways back. On my jack planes, I set my cap-iron back 1/16" or sometimes more for heavy work & I have no trouble with chatter, but I also have thicker 'after-market' blades, which probably need less pre-tensioning than the originals...

Anyway, it sems that you are on the right road, & with a little bit more fiddling, you should have those shavings streaming noicely out of the throat...

Cheers,