Originally Posted by
Kees Heiden
If you managed a good glueup with hardly any level differences bewteen the individual boards, then it is allready reasonably flat and you won't need a jointer. I would go directly to a smoothing plane, #4. It's advantage is that when the table isn't totally flat, this small plane will be able to dip into any shallow hollows. With a longer jointer or tryplane you would need to do a complete flattening of the table top again, which isn't really neccessary. When you goofed up the glueup and there are ridges between the several boards, then you are back to square one and need to do an entire flattening process.
A scraperplane like mentioned above would be usefull too, allthough it doesn't give quite as nice a finish.
And thicknessing is a process you'd want to avoid in handplaning as much as possible. If you want the looks of a 3/4" thick tabletop while the boards are still 7/8", I would relieve the underside of the edges, not bring the entire board down to 3/4.