u/Storm_Epidemic

Hello.

To cut things short, I found a No. 5 plane from an antique store and felt inspired to fix it up and use it on my first major project. As far as I can tell, it is a Stanly No. 5 plane, but I honestly can't say for 100% based on it's performance.

I can't seem to keep the blade sharp for more than a single board of soft pine wood. I have adjusted the frog, sharped the blade to a near mirror finish, used a sharpening jig, and adjusted the chip breaker. It just seems to dull very quickly, with noticeable notches in the blade after a single small motion with the grain. I have been sure to use the lateral adjuster to ensure a flat edge of the blade against the wood, or at least I think.

I have been careful to slowly adjust the blade down with the adjuster as well.

Could my blade be of bad temper? I know it is a Defiance blade as per the stamp, but could the quality of the steel be that bad? I understand that the sole is perhaps a little off from being totally flat but should that be causing something like this?

I am a total newbie to not only planes, but wood working in general. I am a software engineer so never really worked with hand tools. Totally open to being told that I've messed it all up or that I'm missing something obvious. I could totally this be just me being bad a sharpening as well.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

I wouldn't say I am new to Blender (~2500 hours), but I have also never taken a course or anything like that. Everything I know is from trial and error or from habit. I need to know: how are you really supposed to make textures for 3D objects? I need to make a texture similar to the one attached to this post, and I can't seem to figure it out without it being a massive headache.

These are the options I've ran through:

1. Texture paint. Doesn't help, as I can't figure out how to do perfect square shapes.

2. Substance painter. Haven't tried it, I think it would have the same issue as option #1.

3. Unwrap & draw in external program. This is my go-to, but it is a huge pain in the butt and I hate it. There must be a better, correct way to go about this. Been doing it this way for years and I have never been able to get "professional" results. The main draw back to this is getting things to line up correctly or identifying which faces are which from the UV map.

4. Shader graph. Not intuitive, don't think it will give me the results I need as what I'm looking for is not procedural or repeating. I also don't believe this texture was originally made using graphs.

I'm getting frustrated by the lack of explanations online, but it could be that I'm not asking the right question. Its starting to seem like magic how "professional" artists can have these nicely packed UVs with perfect textures with no blurring, stretching, or misalignment.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.