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I have some small pieces of wood that I want to use to make knife handles. They are about 5" long by 2" wide and about 3/8" thick. I like to plane them down to 3/16". They are too small to run thru my dew alt planer. I tried double sided taping them to larger boards and running them thru but that did not work as they just pull off the tape and break into pieces. Any suggestions.
The first thought is it may be time to get a drum sander. Though I think good quality double sided tape, it exists, will fix you problem. Short of that people have come up with many interesting ways to fix that issue, though I am not completely familiar with them to comment.
This is one of those places where a hand plane is really efficient- unless you are doing hundreds of these, hand planing them on a bench is faster than trying to set up a machine and a jig to do them.
Doublesided tape doesn't help much in a machine planer if the wood has funky grain, which the interesting stuff often does.
Glue long strips to each side, plane and saw the strips back off. You could do a row of 4 or 5 at a time.
Double sided tape will, however, work quite well for holding small pieces to be hand planed.
Bandsaw. Its pretty much built for this. You could glue them to a long strip of plywood, then resaw using a TS by ripping them off, I'd leave the keeper on the outside of the blade personally. But if you have a BS, that and a push block will make short work of this in a safe manner.
Bandsaw close to your dimension, either handplane (my preference) or hand sand to fit.
If you're working with expensive species, a decent handplane will pay off fast.
You'll need a bench hook with a low stop to allow the plane to clear.
The following picture on page 143 shows the setup method in action.
Glue them all in a straight line to a sacrificial peice the same width. After they dry, rip them to thickness on the TS.
EXAMPLE: Let's say you have six peices. Cut a peice of scrap 2" W by 30" L. Glue each of your peices to the scrap all in a row. When dry, place scrap against the TS fence and rip the face barely removing any stock to make all peices the same thickness. (Now would be a good time to sand them to suit with a ROS, rather than sanding small peices individually). Place the scrap against the fence again and rip to retain 3/16" thick peices on the cut-offs.