Plane track marks?

[mayhew]

I'm currently tackling my first real project ever (Shaker-inspired step-stool, using spruce), and after using my #4 plane to do some smoothing, I've discovered a problem. It feels really smooth when running my hand over the wood, and visibly I see no imperfections. However, I can feel slight ridges left by my plane, despite cambering the iron as seen in Paul Sellers' video

These ridges are entirely invisible to my naked eye, except for when I turned the panel at almost 90° to a strong light source. I had thought that I could use a smoothing plane to get the surface almost perfectly smooth - am I doing something wrong or did I have unreasonable expectations? The previous project I did as a sort of trial run had these ridges as well, but that was before I knew about cambering the iron and they were much more visible. I ended up sanding for an inordinately long time to get the ridges out and I'd been hoping to do a better job prior to sanding this time round so that I don't have to spend untold hours simply sanding.

 

   

[RenaissanceWW]

Either you are taking too deep a cut or you haven't cambered the iron enough.  The tracks you are feeling are left by the corners of the blade digging in.  If you are getting whisper thin shavings then you need to add a little bit more camber so that the corners disappear into the body of the plane.  First I would try reducing the depth of cut until those tracks disappear in case you are taking too heavy a cut. 

 

I just looked at the image of your blade and what you have there looks more like you clipped off the corners and not created a camber.  A camber will be a smooth curve all the way out to the edges.  With your current shape the corners may be tucked up inside the sole but the sharp angle created by that "chamfer" on the edges will still create those tracks.  A consistent curve will produce a shaving that feathers away into nothing thus eliminating the tracks.

[mayhew]

Thanks for the reply, and sorry for the delay in mine. After reading your post I did a lot of reading online about cambering a blade, and after some unsuccessful attempts I finally managed to produced a camber that gives me track-free planing. You clearly were right about the chamfer vs. camber thing - I think I confuse the terms a lot. Thanks!