planing down small boards

[fred henkin]

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.

[Van Huskey]

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.

[Josiah Bartlett]

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.

[glenn bradley]

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.

[Bill Haumann]

Double sided tape will, however, work quite well for holding small pieces to be hand planed.

[Peter Quinn]

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.

[Jim Matthews]

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.

[Bob Carreiro]

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.