Here’s an interesting problem I’ve made for myself. I’m finishing my wood working workbench (finally) and have been handplaning the laminated bench top. It’s built with maple lamination approx 3 inches thick and made up of couple dozen boards. The problem I’ve run across, and this NEVER occured to me as I carefully looked at each boards grain structure and placed them together for the glue up, is that the grain is opposing from board to board relevant to hand planing. This means that with two side by side board edges, if I plane in one direction, I get a good cut on one board, and massive tearing on the second. Reverse planing direction and I just reverse which board cuts well and which one suffers massive tearing. Skewing the plan helps a little, with the emphasis on little. What in the heck do you do with this situation?
Just when you think you’ve got it licked!!
Jeff
Replies
Try planing at about 75º to 90º across the grain. Get the plane sharp and set fine for the final planing. Also you could incorporate the use of a scraper at latter stages once the top is acceptably flat via planing, and probably finish up using abrasive paper, either by hand or with a sander, e.g., a random orbital sander. Slainte.
Richard Jones Furniture
Jeff, it should be hardly a problem at all. Further to what Richard has said I suggest your plane blade should have a slight camber, or at least be sure to take the corners off the blade. I would use my #51/2 or #6 but others would prefer something longer.
Anyway, if it were a piece of furniture one would set a higher priority to matching the timber for looks rather than "planeability"- I would hope so at least.
Well, certainly 'planability' was not a consideration when I was judging the best way to place the boards for the table top. Make no mistake, I did place each board carefully in an attempt to best offset the stresses between each board that would invariable occur with age and environmental influences, but how the lamination would plane was not something I thought to consider. I'm just glad to hear that no one is saying you blew it, everybody knows to watch out for this. I guess it's like I tell my kids when they whine, "nothing worth doing comes easy"...Also, I DID switch to my card scraper when I got the bulk of the material off...Thanks...Jeff
Jeff, there are always rules handed down by other workers about how to arrange boards for table tops, cabinet tops, and even bench tops in your case.
There's alternate end grain cupping: only use boards no more than 75- 100 mm wide (3"- 4".) Then there's orientate end grain cupping with the concavity of the growth rings always facing up-- this one makes sense particularly in the USA where the milling typically is done by rotating the log through 90º after each plank is cut which means the one face often has a lot of sap. American grading can throw you because the wood is graded essentially by assessing on one face only and this can mean the other face is pretty much all sapwood.
There are more so called hard and fast 'rules' suggested by some, but I shan't go into them all- and these rules usually don't make a lot of sense as being infallible for every circumstance. Each job needs to be assessed according to the circumstances. For instance, I quite commonly arrange the boards for the most attractive grain and pay no heed to the orientation of the growth rings, nor which side is bark or heart side, nor which way the grain rises and falls in the length, and I'll also make up tops with random width boards, which is anathema to some.
Anyway, in your case I guess you've got tangentially sawn boards where the wide faces are glued together and you've mostly got something close to bastard cut, rift cut or radially cut edges facing up the way and down the way. It's seldom you can arrange the rising grain all facing one way in long top glue-ups. There's usually some, or even a lot of grain reversal from one plank to the next, and it can be a bit of a challenge to plane. You get similar difficulties where you are working with timbers that have alternating spiralling in the growth, e.g., zebrano, ribbon striped sapele and mahogany, etc..
So, planing across the grain as I suggested earlier will get you most of the way there, plus a bit of scraping and sanding should do it. Also, don't forget, you're only building a workbench that should get bashed to hell and back in its life-- you ain't building a bleedin' pianer as many people say. Well, I say that anyway, ha, ha. Slainte.Richard Jones Furniture
Well there you go , then-the three of us are one. Howabout that for arithmetic?Philip Marcou
Jeff,
My recently-completed bench suffered the same issue - the laminated top boards were oriented to avoid shape-changing but this meant grain going in opposing directions from plank-to-plank.
All the above advice worked but I used a BU plane with a cutting angle of 62 degrees, taking light cuts, towards the end of the process. This begins to move more towards scraping than planing; but it does take shavings where planing with a 45 degree cutting angle (even across the grain) previously made tear out. The use of a 62 degree blade obviated the need for loads of scraping.
I ended up taking the last micro-tearout off with an RO sander. But by then the top was dead flat (from planing only) and needed only that micro tearout and a few very fine plane-tramlines to be got rid of. It took only a few minutes with the RO sander using 240 grit. Perhaps a scraper would do the same job as that final RO sand, if set for a very fine cut?
Lataxe
Thanks all. I'll take your advice to heart.
BTW, I was/am using a BU plane, my new Veritas LA Jack plane. What a nice plane, it's a keeper....Maybe I'll get another blade, it came with the 25 degree blade, but I could get a 38 or 50 degree blade. I'm thinking the 50 degree blade, based on your comments? Hmmm. Might pay off for flattening the benchtop. Up till now I was only tweaking it to mount my vise to the bottom....haven't tried flattening the top yet, but that must be done at some point.
Best regards....Jeff
Jeff,
I made a little error in my last post. The plane I used has a 15 degree bed and takes the Veritas BU blades. I used a 50 degree blade with a 2 degree microbevel on it. The cutting angle was therefore 67 degrees, not 62.
Apologies for the error.
I suspect anything over 60 degrees is gioing to reduce that tearout, though.
Lataxe
Jeff, Another option is an old Tage Frid techique - use a router as a surfacing planer. Build a frame all around the bench top. The top surfaces of the 4 frame members must be in the same plane. Build a sled that spans the short dimension of the benchtop that rides the long dimension of the frame. The router slides side to side across the benchtop on this sled as the sled moves the long dimension of the bench top, allowing the router bit to surface every square inch of the top. Use a 1/2" single or double blade router bit. The larger the bit, the faster the work. The surface of the benchtop will be defined by the plane of top of the outer frame. It goes surprisingly quickly and extremely accurately. Rich
The pragmatic solution is to find a nearby shop with a wide belt sander. One near me charges $25 for 15 min. With travel time I can have any table or bench top up to 48" wide flat as a pancake in 45 min. for $25 and a gallon of gas.
John O'Connell - JKO Handcrafted Woodworking
The more things change ...
We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
Petronious Arbiter, 210 BC
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