I am very new to woodworking – my previous experience with power tools has been limited to a drill (for hanging pictures) and a sewing machine. Started with making some boxes for a garden project and somehow the bug just bit me. Now I have a wood stash that equals my fabric stash and a gazillion projects in the planning stages (you can never have enough shelving can you?).
I’m so fortunate to have found FWW and you folks!!! Have learned so much already.
Won’t be (at least not yet) outfitting a whole big shop. Decided a jig saw is the best (safest) cutting tool for me and what I thus far plan to do (got a good Bosch and can cut fairly straight with guides). Have acquired a couple of older, never used, Craftsman routers – probably adequate for now, just want to do rabbets and dados for bookcases. And some power sanders.
My question, for now is about straightening boards.
Who knew that you can’t just walk into a lumber store and get nice straight pieces of wood? (this from a quilter – you can get a piece of fabric to do pretty much what you want it to with an iron and a cutting tool).
I’m thinking about getting a planer and wondering if it would be worth it? I could afford a couple of hundred dollars for a low-end planer. I’ve considered trying to find someone local to plane boards for me, but it just wouldn’t be the same. I want to do it myself.
I don’t need perfect boards (yet), just a little straighter and more manageable.
So, would that be a logical next investment for me?
Replies
Planers aren't really for straightening boards. Their rollers are strong enough that they temporarily flatten a board going through it. This allows them to make the top side of the board parallel to the bottom side, but then once the board has passed through the machine, it will mostly just pop back into its original twisted or cupped shape. A jointer is the tool designed to remove cup and twist. In some ways, you need both a jointer and a planer -- but that said, let me add that there a number of hobbyist woodworkers who use a sled with their planer to trick it into acting like a jointer. This is what I use, and since I'm not flattening boards every day or even every month I'm perfectly content to go without a jointer. There was an article by Keith Rust -- complete with cover picture, as I recall -- in a FWW a few years back that goes into great detail on building a planer sled.
Good luck -- I find woodworking an immensely satisfying hobby, and it sounds like you're already well on the way!
Careful, you're on a slippery slope! ;-)
Straightening wood -- you ask more than you know! Wood can be "crooked" in a lot of very different ways, each requiring different tactics to correct. It can be bowed, bent, twisted, cupped or warped in one or more of three planes. To make matters worse, once you do something to straighten it, forces internal to the wood that are relieved by the machining operation can make it bend in entirely new directions than it started out.
The way wood is usually rendered flat and straight is to run it over a jointer to get one side planar, and then run it through a thickness planer to bring the other side coplanar/parallel to the first. This will likely result in wood that is significantly thinner than what you started with. For this reason, it's pretty fruitless to try this with lumber that has already been surfaced (unless you start with a 2X when you really only need a 1X), since you end up with a straight board that's too thin to be of use except for maybe drawer sides. Rough cut lumber is about 1" thick to start with, planing reducing it's thickness to about 3/4" finished. If you start with 3/4", you may wind up with 1/2" wood, or less, depending on the severity of the problem.
If you are careful about picking only straight stock to begin with, you can often eliminate the jointer and go straight to the planer, but there are those who consider this heresy. ;-) (Works for me, tho'.) But this requires starting with rough cut lumber -- see above.
All this planing can also be done with hand planes, but it's a skill acquired with no small amount of practice and much manual labor.
If the board is merely crooked (it lays nice and flat on a table, but is shaped like a "C"), your task is easier. You can straighen it ("joint" it) by using a long plane, or a straight edge guide and a saw or router. You, of course, end up with a narrower board than you started with.
All that said, if you are just starting out and don't want to jump in the deep end just yet, the easiest thing would be to find a better lumber supplier and be very careful picking out your stock. If you go to a real lumber store, you likely *can* walk in and get nice, straight pieces of lumber. This rules out Home Depot and the like. You'll need to look around for a good yard that caters to professional finish carpenters or cabinet makers as opposed to the big box DIY stores.
Mike Hennessy
Pittsburgh, PA
EDIT: If you fill out your profile to tell us where you are located, someone near you may be able to point you to a good lumber source.
Edited 5/27/2008 8:06 am ET by MikeHennessy
Sparky,
You are headed in the right directions.
(I will digress: My wife had a good friend, now dead, who was a quilter. One day the two of them visited my shop. Nancy, the quilter, looked at me and asked, "Do you ever make mistakes?" Of course, my answer was "Yes" and we then shared a common bond. I will miss her directness.)
My personal response to your question is two fold: Yes - buy a jointer. You will appreciate and value the experience of working with straight and flat wood. I know, you will need a planer too, but the jointer comes first. Second - find a source of rough lumber. Don't buy the pre-smoothed stuff for the reasons expressed above. The joy you will get from seeing the grain emerge from the rough-cut surface is worth the expense (investment) in the tools.
Frosty
"I sometimes think we consider the good fortune of the early bird and overlook the bad fortune of the early worm." FDR - 1922
I'll give you my take on the process and I'll start by saying that if you don't start with flat square stock, you will have a painful woodorking experience. I speak from experience. I did not start my shop with all the tools I have now. I worked with what I had and copensated and building my inventory of tools over the years. You will do two operations flattening and thicknessing to the final dimension. The first step is get one flat surface. You can use a jointer that is powered or a hand plane like a LN #7 or, you could use a thicknessing planer with a sled (there are articles here that can explain that). You will have different methods depending if the stock has a twist or a cup. I would reccomend Rob Cosmons rough to ready dvd. He explains how to get rough stock flat. It is based on hand planes but it will give you the baics. After you get the first surface flat, get the adjacent surface flat & 90 degrees to the first face. Once your done, the thickness planer will get the face opposite your first face parallel. Remember a thickness planer will not make anything flat. It will only make the cut face parallel to the opposite face. Finally you can run the board now good except the final face through the table saw to get it finished. You can do all this with hand planes or power tools. I've done both. Both methods have bennefits, one for speed the other for the sole. Good luck woodworking is a wonderful experience.
If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it.
And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
Your respondents seem to assume that you must use power tools. Remember that the finest funiture in museums was made using hand tools. It takes longer, but costs a lot less.
Tom
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