trouble handplaning hard wood

In my opinion, if I was to take a #4 to a board and it very infrequently made contact w/ the wood, but when it did it dug in so much that it stopped the plane dead in its tracks, I would think that the board is definitely not flat enough for the smoother. A smoother is a short plane, so it should follow hills and valleys pretty well -- if it doesn't, then the board must not be that flat.

You could take your smoother and set it so the blade is just BARELY visible when sighting down the sole, and start running it acros the board taking down the high spots and slowly advancing. This is how I personally set my depth -- under a light, sight down the bottom of the sole, and starting with the blade fully retracted, slowly advance it until you just barely start to see it. Make sure it's not skewed to one side or another; adjust accordingly. Take it and start running it across the board. If you're not getting anything at all (you should, if your board is somewhat flat and your plane sole is flat) then something's up.

I personally (not saying it's wrong) wouldn't tune my plane in on pine (I'm envisioning a piece of 2x4 white pine from Home Depot) because you could easily PRESS into that wood enough to flatten it out and compress the fibers enough to get a good shaving. You won't get the same results from a nice hard wood like curly maple. If you want to tune your plane in that way, and I see the value in doing that on another board that's not your "good" piece, I would at least use a piece of scrap of the same wood.

If it were me, I would take out my bevel up jointer with my high angle blade, great combination in figured wood, and knock down those high spots until I am getting a full length shaving. I would set it to take really fine shavings w/ a tight mouth. I really get a nice surface from my jointer like this, so I would probably then just go straight to a card scraper (esp. in that wood) and concentrate on anything that needed attention. I realize you might not have a bevel up jointer or a card scraper, just sayin' that's what I would do. I would highly recommend a card scraper on that wood -- even the Lie Nielsen ones are inexpensive.

Hope there is some help in there somewhere.

I do a lot of curly maple.  I have a lot of really nice, really sharp hand planes, and  I use them a lot - just not on curly maple. 

So what to do?  When I want my project completed in the year I started it, I dampen the target surface of my curly maple with a spray bottle and promptly feed it through my 13" portable planer with new, sharp blades until it is the flat thickness that I want for the project at hand.  No tearout.  Looks nice.  Doesn't warp.  Is immediately ready for SANDING.

Then I SAND the surface with progressively finer grits starting with 120 and ending up with 320 grit.  This is the non zen, practical approach for building with curly maple.  Fight it if you must, but in the hour of your dispair, remember what I told you.  SAND curly maple!

Yes, if you MASTER the handplane (this includes sharpening beyond the atomic level) and don't mind having a big hunk of tearout appear in an unrepairable spot with your last stroke of the smoothing plane - do punish yourself with a hand plane.

However, if you've no major sins to atone for, and you want to finish you project before you are an old person - sand curly maple.

At Lie Nielsen's suggestion I've been using poplar to set up my hand planes with great success.  I use a small strip perhaps 2" x 3/4" x 3/4".  With the plane vertical on the bench I simply pull the strip past both edges of the blade and compare the thickness of the two shavings, or you can put the poplar strip against a bench stop and push the plane across it, again using the two edges. 

drive,

Couple things.  You can easily push a plane thru pine taking a shaving that will dog you down in a harder wood like maple. As others have suggested,  to successfully plane curly maple, everything must be just so.  Very sharp blade, set very fine. You might try planing across the width of the boards.  Without a perfect set-up, (high bed angle, closed mouth, sharp, set fine) curly maple will tear out or dig in due to the nature of the ripply grain.  Planing cross grain will sometimes mitigate this problem.

Finally, you mention that the blade is ground at 45 degrees.  If this is in a common-pitch, bevel down plane, you have no clearance behind the bevel.  That's a non-starter right there. Plane irons are normally ground somewhere around 30 degrees.

Ray

drive,

Couple things.  You can easily push a plane thru pine taking a shaving that will dog you down in a harder wood like maple. As others have suggested,  to successfully plane curly maple, everything must be just so.  Very sharp blade, set very fine. You might try planing across the width of the boards.  Without a perfect set-up, (high bed angle, closed mouth, sharp, set fine) curly maple will tear out or dig in due to the nature of the ripply grain.  Planing cross grain will sometimes mitigate this problem.

Finally, you mention that the blade is ground at 45 degrees.  If this is in a common-pitch, bevel down plane, you have no clearance behind the bevel.  That's a non-starter right there. Plane irons are normally ground somewhere around 30 degrees.

Ray