Case of the Flexible Planer Blade

That's the blade on my new Craftsman 12 1/2" planer. The other blade (there are two) has a smaller piece in the same location.

After doing some research and calling Sears service, it appears that curly maple causes this on occasion. And guess what I was planing?

I keep the cuts VERY light on curly maple, but it seems that I still need to be extra careful. In this case I didn't notice until there were burn marks on the wood I was feeding though. So that chip is actually lots of little chips built up over several passes.

The nice thing is that the blade and gib straightened out nicely, with the gib requiring just a little bit of filing to square the end.