I am very experienced wood This great hand plan I enjoy using it cuts very fine shaving, will be order more like it, the plan works best on soft woods like pine , drawback is that it doesn't come ready to use you have to tune it up your self.I recommend you watching video on you tube how to tune your japanese plans several good one

Excellent small kanna for the price. It is stamped steel, but the heat treatment seems to be good, at least well enough for softer woods like pine and alder. As with all kanna, there is a lot of fiddling to tune it, sharpening the blade etc. But it really does make small shaping and planing tasks easy and enjoyable.

*When removing the blade, hit the back of the dai body until the blade is free.

I first sharpened the blade from 1000 to 10,000 grit then removed the double bevel on the chipbreaker and sharpened to 4000 grit, then groud the chip breaker on the sides slightly cause it was too tight. After that, with both blades inserted 95%, I flattened the sole and then relieved it to only have contact on the very front, right before the blade mouth area, then at the rear. At this point, it was tuning the blade to where I wanted it and the last photo shows a translucent shaving. I could probably get thinner if I wanted but this is good enough for me.

Not a beginners's set up. If you don't have experience with this style of plane, this is not the place to start. Wooden planes are tricky and subtle to set up. Once set, up the experience of pulling a long thin shaving off a board with a wooden plane is so good you may have to restrain yourself from moaning in pleasure.

Mine required some dressing and tuning before it was ready to use.

Flatten the back of the chipbreaker which was proud in the wrong places. Not much work needed.

Dress the sides of the blade which were left very rough, so that the blade didn't bind in its groove. Didn't take much time on the stone.

Pair away the inside of the cheeks till the chip breaker moved freely but snug. (I think this and the last are due to bone dry conditions in NM which caused some shrinkage.

Blade is not a hiqh quality laminated blade but looks good steel and comes double @#$%! sharp

Mouth is about 1/6 which is too wide for finish planing, ( there are ways to modify the gap if needed. )

All in all this is a great little tool for very little money.

My first Japanese handplane, and I found this one easy to setup and start messing around with. It's good enough to convince me I may need another one to experiment with, but make no mistake it's not replacing my western planes. I somehow lucked into an old Stanley 605 and put a Hock blade in it and I've never seen thinner hardwood shavings than that combination can make, including YouTube videos of Japanese competitions. That said this has definite benefits on softwood and is WELL worth $17!

A $17 Japanese plane couldn't possibly be worth its weight right? I mean the whole culture and tradition surrounding Japanese planes involves LOTS of man-hours invested hand tooling every piece... and obviously that costs more than $17... so what on earth is this thing?

Well basically it appears to be a machine milled block (dai), and a die cut chunk of steel for a blade. That's really it, and there's nothing magic to it, but there are some small details that make this plane nearly ready to go right out of the package!

I snapped some quick photos to illistrate what I'm talking about. The body is all just milled, but it's very flat from the front to the mouth and then ever so slightly relieved behind the mouth just like it should be. The mouth is all just milled, but because the blade is also just a stamped out piece the fit is already very close to what it should be and I expect will be exact after I work on the blade just a bit. I'll come back and finish this review after I hone it up and take some shavings, but so far I'm very pleased. I feel like I paid for a build your own plane kit, and got what looks like a truly functional tool!

I have a Stanley 60 1/2 and was considering a new blade for it, but for less than the cost of an aftermarket blade I grabbed this and the Moore and Wright 4003 square I'm using as a straight edge in the pics. If this holds an edge and works endgrain well, it's a 5 star product at twice this price.

Update: planed some yellow pine 2x4 without even sharpening it, just filed the blade and chip breaker a smidge to get a fit I liked in the dai and went to town. I knew the technique was backwards from a western plane but I didn't think about how much easier it would make it to line it up planing an edge to get a clean entry onto the board face. Normally with a block plane or Stanley 3 or 4 I might get a little sloppy on the first 1" or so of a board edge, but with this the start was perfect and then the very end got sloppy. Even with a factory sharpened blade it has a very cool burnishing effect on pine that I don't see with any western planes. I'm very satisfied with this purchase even if I only mess around with this on my little pine shop shiznit projects. For the price, size, and weight this thing will probably be with me anytime I do something in softwood. Interested to see how the edge holds up.

Good little plane that required little tinkering to get it ready to use out of the box. Of course, putting a finer edge on the iron via a ceramic water stone improved it's performance, I could make use of it straight away. This is a surprisingly good plane for the price as compared to ones I have spent 3-4 times as much on. I tried two of these less expensive Japanese planes offered by Amazon and was pleased with both.