Hello all,
i imagine this question has been answered many times in various forms but my apologies i need to reask it
i want to resaw 12 in wide african mahogany that is 2 inches thick into ~ 4 think slices. now i have a 12 in planer but i first would need to joint it? correct? well the issue is the jointer that i can get my hand on is 8 inches….
lost – dazed and confused
thanks
Replies
Here's one way to solve your problem:
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Hand planing (rough) lumber to dimension is not hard:
Ideally, you need 5 planes: a scrub plane, a #5, a #7 or #8, a #4 or #4-1/2, and a low angle block plane, but you can get away with a #5 and a low angle block plane -- it's just a little harder. (Or you can use wooden equivalents.)
You'll also need a good straight edge, an accurate try or combination square, a marking/panel gauge, and a pair of winding sticks (you can make these yourself). A card scraper is also handy.
Select a board face for the reference face. Use a pair of winding sticks and a straight edge to determine the high and low spots. Mark the high spots and use the scrub plane to reduce them to the approximate level of the rest of the board. Check for twist with the winding sticks. Correct with the scrub, as necessary. By this time, you should have a roughly flat (length and width) board with no twist and with a lot of troughs in it. Use the #5 to remove the troughs from the scrub plane. (Planing diagonally or straight across the grain in both directions with the scrub plane and the #5 to remove the scrub troughs will significantly reduce tearout in most woods. Then follow up with the #5 by planing with the grain.) Once the troughs are mostly gone, use the #7 or #8 with the grain to plane the face flat. Once you get full length and full width shavings, you board is very, very close to FLAT. Check with the straight edge and winding sticks. Correct as necessary. Finish up with the smoothing plane (#4 or # 4-1/2). Use the scraper on gnarly grain that gives your smoother a hard time, but be careful not to scrape a dip into the wood. Part 1 of 6, complete.
Mark this face as your reference face. All other measurements of square, etc., will come from this face.
Select one long edge, and use the #5 to roughly flatten/smooth it, and then use the #7/#8 to make it straight and square to the reference face. Mark this edge as your reference edge. Part 2 of 6, complete.
Use the reference edge and the try/combination square to mark one of the short edges square. You can use the #5 to plane to rough plane it flat and square to both the reference face and edge -- if the short edge is 4 to 6 or more inches wide; if not, then start with the LA block plane. (Chamfering the edges down to your cutting line will reduce tear out on the corner edges; alternative methods are to clamp a sacrificial piece of wood to the edge and let it tear out instead of your board, or to plane in from each outside edge.) Use the LA block plane to clean it up. Mark the other short edge to the desired length (saw it to rough length, if necessary) and do the same thing to the other short edge. Parts 3 and 4 of 6, complete.
Use your combination square or a marking/panel gauge to mark the other (unplaned) long edge to the desired finished width. Saw to rough width, if necessary. As you did for the reference long edge, use the #5 to roughly smooth it down almost to the cutting line, and then use the #7/#8 to make it straight and square to the reference face. Check for straight and square to the reference face and to the 2 short edges. All 4 edges should now be square to the reference face and square to each other. Part 5 of 6, complete.
Use your marking gauge, basing off the reference face, to mark the thickness of your board around all 4 edges. Flip the board over to the unplaned face and use the scrub plane to plane down almost to the marked reference lines (The bottoms of the troughs should be about 1/16 inch above the cutting line). Use the #5, and the #7 or #8, as before on the reference face, to make this face flat and square. Finish up with the smoothing plane and, as necessary, the scraper. Part 6 of 6, complete.
At this time, you should have a board with 2 flat, smooth, and parallel faces, 4 flat and square edges (long edges parallel to each other, as well as short edges parallel to each other, and all 4 edges square to the two faces and to each other), and of the required thickness, length, and width, ready for whatever needs to be done next.
The first board you do by hand will take what seems like an inordinately long time, but with just a little bit of practice, it becomes nearly as fast as -- and often faster than -- putting a board through a jointer, thickness planer, and sanding sequence.
If you have a shooting board, you can use it to assist with steps 2, 3, 4, and 5.
A couple of things to keep in mind:
Keep your plane irons SHARP!!
If you have only a couple of planes, open the mouth up for the initial rougher planing, and close the mouth for the finer, finish planing.
Let the plane do the work -- don't force it.
Skewing the plane often helps to reduce tear out and makes planing easier.
Try to keep the amount of wood removed from each face roughly equal; otherwise any internal stresses present may cause the board to warp or cup again, after you have put all that work and effort into making it flat.
Expect to get a good upper body work out!
The listed sequence is not the only sequence that this can be done in, but it works quite well.
Good luck, and have fun! There's nothing quite like the sense of accomplishment you get when you have taken a piece of rough-sawn lumber and turned it into a nicely finished, dimensioned board using only hand-powered tools.
Tschüß!
Mit freundlichen holzbearbeitungischen Grüßen!
James
pzgren's solution is far more elegant than mine, but I've used the planer for both operations with success. I use a flat sled made from 3/4" mdf or baltic birch -- the material doesn't matter as long as it's flat. Screw a low profile fence to the sled -- must be thinner than the stock you're surfacing and well below the planer knives. Place the board on the sled, shim it so it is stable and run it through your planer. Now you have one side that's flat. You can now put the sled away and run the board through, flatend side down and you'll have a board with two parallel surfaces.
Edited 8/14/2006 1:05 pm ET by Mike_B
i place the resawed uneven wood onto a FLAT BED then run it through the planer... remove the bed and flip the wood to plane the other side... but my question is that the rough wood placed on the wood will not be level? so anything planed will take that shape?
thanks for the advice...
If you have a bandsaw and a a thin kerf blade, I recommend you rip the stock to the size of your jointer and reglue. If you reglue along a quartersawn portion of the grain the glue line will be invisible and the board only made stronger. This option is in no way a compromise of your woodworking morals.
another viable option....
i like mikes though... to use a sled but i am just worried that how will the bottom of the wood be flat on the sled if its all rough?
I think you might have missed the part of Mikes post that referred to using shims to steady the board. Once stabilized on the sled the reference face for the planer becomes the MDF sled. Nice and flat. The top of your board will, after as many passes as necessary, be parallel to the MDF face on the planer bed. Then you can turn the board over - without the sled - and plane the other face.Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral. Frank Lloyd Wright
"but my question is that the rough wood placed on the wood will not be level?"The secret is in the shims. Perhaps Keith Rust's article, "Flatten Boards Without a Jointer" in FWW No. 175, Feb. 2005 will explain the operation more clearly than I can. His method is more involved than what I do, but the principle is the same.
thanks a lot Mike... do you any pictures of this set up? i would appreciate it
"do you any pictures of this set up?"Actually, there is a video of the article I referred to here on the site:http://www.taunton.com/finewoodworking/subscription/Workshop/WorkshopArticle.aspx?id=5245
I've done it by hand. Yes it's fun, well it's fun once. Do it four times for a possibly difficult to plane board? Not fun, but yes it will look good. I would gop with a sled, or make one for a router. Or you bite the bullet, slice the wood down, joint and reglue. Then plane. Or you can even belt sand it flat.My rule is the next board you have to joint will always be 1" wider than your brand new, much wider than needed jointer.
The method of shimming the board would be my first step. Lay the board on the sled convex side up, then shim it in the center so it can't flatten under the pressure of the rollers. Plane this side to flat, then flip the board and plane the other side.
Another option that is perhaps even more simplified but wastes a bit more material is to resaw one piece off the board, now you have two boards with one good side and one rough side, run both through the planer with the good side down. Now you have a thin board with two good sides and a thick board with two good sides. Resaw the thick board again and repeat the planer process. At this point you have two good sides on two thin boards and one thick board with two good sides. The third resaw will give you two thin boards with one good side each. Run those through the planer as well and now you have 4 thin boards with 2 good sides. A bit more scrap loss to the planer perhaps but this will solve your problem assuming that the board is straight and flat to begin with or that you have gone through the flattening process using the sled method.
A third option is to mount a router bit with a flat bottom in a router with a wide base plate on it. Set your stock between two parallel spacer boards that are flat and straight. Make multiple passes with the router to remove the high spots in the resawn stock until you get one flat side. Then move to the plainer. I think this is the most complicated, but it does work on irregular stock with wild grain that might not be practical by other means.
You may be able to use the planer right off the band saw. If you put the blank on a flat surface and it doesn't rock, you can use that as a temporary reference surface and put it through the planer. If it rocks, you're going to have to do some flattening, for which you've gotten both power-based (rip, machine, reglue) and hand-based (James' guide) solutions.
There's a compromise position here, which I just had to do last night. 12 1/2" x 20" board, 13" planer, 8" jointer. Badly twisted beautiful piece of 5/4 cherry, which I got for really cheap because of the twist. Can't fix it with the planer, because the rollers crush the board down hard enough to temporarily remove the wind and bow, and the board comes out thinner but just as bad.
I almost did the shim/sled thing, but this was a really unstable board and I didn't want to have it unsteady in the planer. So I decided to start with a scrub plane.
I put the convex side (it was bowed as well) down and figured out where the high points were. Turned it over, used a scrub plane to knock off the high points. Repeat several times until it's hard to tell where the high points are. Then (I learned this trick from Rob Cosman's Rough To Ready DVD) hold it in its most stable position, and scrub the whole board back and forth on your flat bench. Turn it over, and the high points will be burnished. Mark 'em with a pencil and use the scrub to take 'em down. Repeat a number of times and the board will quickly get flat enough to be the underside on the planer. I don't think I spent 15 minutes on it.
Once the board doesn't rock on your bench, use the planer to get the top surface flat, then you can invert it again and use the planer to remove the rough surface you left with the scrub.
The first time you do this it's a bit slower but you pick it up PDQ. It's a good compromise, yielding nicer stock than ripping and gluing, but easier than totally milling the stock with hand tools.
Edited 8/14/2006 4:29 pm by John_D
A technique that I've utilized before with good results, although it takes extra precaution in the shop, is to take the blade guard off of your jointer and set the fence to just over half the width of the board you want to surface. Run one side of the board through the jointer, being extra careful to stay away from the blades. Now rotate the board 180 degrees and run the other side through the jointer. Repeat until the surface is acceptably flat. Any small ridges will be taken out with the planer. It should be noted that this technique does not always work well on wood that is figured or has grain that is very uni-directional. You can get tearout pretty badly and give yourself more work then when you started. Hope this helps.
My jointer has a pin on the infeed right near where the blade guard spindle fits into the bed. I assume the pin is there to stop the blade guard (dont know why this is important as it hits the fence first anyhow).At any rate, this method wont work for me -- I wanted to face joint half a board and then hand plane the rest down to that level. Unfortunately I realised I couldn't when I took the guard off and saw that pin protruding.
BigFrank---My jointer has the same pin that catches the blade guard from spinning all the way around after a board passes through. If it is like yours, it is a cotter pin that can be tapped in and out of the slot. You typically have to do this if you're using your jointer to rabbet a board as well. Anywho, I use a nail set and lightly tap the cotter pin down until it is flush with the bed. Then you can joint a wide board and reset the pin when finished. Just tap the pin from the underside of the jointer to it's original height. Hope this helps.
Thanks!
I haven't yet used my jointer to rabbet - I usually do this on the TS. I should have realized there was a way to do it though since I knew my jointer could do rabbets.
I have started using hand planes. I have the LN #7 and a low angle Jack. Recently added a scrub plane. I purchased Rob Cosman's (pardonn the sp) Rough to Ready DVD from LN's site, and its not all that bad using his method. Hand tools are a lot slower but I like it. (and I'm a die hard power tool junkie!).
That Khaya ribbon strip is nice lumber, have about 950' of it. Bring the lumber by and use my 16" jointer.
DJK
S.E. MI
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