new stanley #5 - help to tune
Hey - I recently bought a Stanley Bailey No. 5 Jack plane. Unfortunately I bought it with a mistaken understnding of the quality of the tool.
I've followed the Scarey Sharp (very cool, am doing all my chisels and have nearly completely hairless arms.... :D ) for the blade, and the tuning system that is described or linked on various threads on this forum.
My problem is that the plane seems really poorly engineered. The frog is nearly impossible to set square to the mouth. The cap iron is almost impossible to set square to the iron edge. The actual design or engineering of the plane seems to be setting it up for a very poor end result. Add to this the general shoddy standard of production ... and I am in a world of hurt with this tool. The end result is that after about 15 - 20 strokes along a 1200mm 100x100mm cypress post - the plane blade is skewed in the mouth and I need to reset it with the Lateral Adjusting Lever.
Anyone experienced the skewing of the blade and is able to give me some pointers???
Apologies to Stanley - if I have got one that slipped through quality control... if not, and my plane is 'up to spec' then the apology is withdrawn.