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Thread: planer for uneven wood strips of thickness

  1. #1

    planer for uneven wood strips of thickness

    Hi. I live next to a commercial wood shop that has lots of free scrap in the form of cut off strips. Every board that goes in the door is striped on a table saw to square up the edges. These strips are of un-even thickness. I would like to plane the rough side and use this scrap to make sellable products.

    Is it a workable idea??? to buy a citizen quality planer and run a stack of un-even thickness strips through the planer, resulting in even thickness semi finished strips?

    How I imagine it is that the feed rollers can self adjust to deal with the variable thickness, while the planer takes the minimum bite at the set thickness level.

    In general the strips are from 3/4 to 2 inches wide and are made up of a mix of recycled fur, new popular and some nice wood (about once a month).

    thanks in advance

    marty
    shenhui 900x1200 dual tubes 150 & 60

  2. #2
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    How thick are these strips? And how much do they vary in thickness?
    The primary purpose of a thickness planer is to mill lumber to a consistent thickness.
    Larry J Browning
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  3. #3
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    The variation of thickness will be the maximum cutting depth of your planer I think. For example, a stationary 15" planer can probably hog off around 1/4" in one pass, and a lunchbox maybe 1/8".

    You're not going to put in 8/4 and 6/4 stick and get 5/4 out in one pass.

  4. #4
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    Industrial thickness planers are designed to accommodate lumber of different thickness within certain limits, they have segmented feed rollers and chip breakers. This means you can push two different thickness of stock through, both are properly held down because every 2 1/2"-3" of infeed roller is on its own set of springs. The home shop planers are meant to accept wood of more or less the same thickness and have solid infeed rollers to this end. Put in wood that varies much in thickness and you run the risk of a kick back, best case scenario one piece stalls and the cut is lousy. Put in a third piece, things get weird IME. So there are limits to potential productivity with the "citizen" build planer. Being a natural wood seagull with access to cheap but small, weird and oddly sized cutoffs from various jobs, I find its best first sort into a few basic sizes, then do a primary rip at the BS to limit my sizes and make less chips. Off cuts can then be burned in the fireplace rather than dragged to the local farm as animal bedding or the land fill. If the sizes are close I'll set the planer for a deep cut and sort my sizes into a few basic ranges on a cart, basically every 1/4" so its quicker to run through then plane away.

  5. #5
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    In order to do this safely with more than one piece at a time feeding, you will NEED a machine that has segmented feed rolls and chip breaker assemblies. Anything other than that is asking for serious injury. But, yes absolutely can be done.

  6. #6
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    How much do the strips vary in thickness?

    Are they uniform in width and length?

    This might be easily solved with a handplane, and dedicated runners to maintain constant cutter height.

    Rather than run something thin through a planer, run the planer over something thin...

    I use HDPE (UHMW) plastic guides for this purpose, the plane blade cuts a slight rabbet off the inside edge of each.
    Everything is held down with double sided tape.

    It can be so long as you like, if you have enough plastic.

    http://www.rockler.com/uhmw-plastic-...3-8-inch-thick

  7. #7
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    When you try and run different thickness lumber through a typical lunchbox planer it's only going to pick up the thickest piece or maybe slightly less thick depending on how much your taking off. If I had access to usable free wood I would get a planer. Typically when I'm trying to even up different boards, I start with the thickest, run it through put it aside and try the next thickest piece. If it's still too thick I run the first one again and retest the other boards until they are picked up by the pressure roller.
    My three favorite things are the Oxford comma, irony and missed opportunities

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  8. #8
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    Several years ago as our woodworking club was making some kids toys for the less fortunate, I obtained several dozen ripsaw cutoff strips of 4/4 poplar from a nearby molding shop that were like those described by the OP. We were using them for the pull handles on boys wagons and I ran them through my Dewalt DW733 lunchbox planer to dimension them to 3/4" square stock. All of the cutoffs were 10 - 12' long lengths of 1" rough stock but the cutoff dimensions varied from about 1" to 1-3/4" in width. DAMHIKT, but you do not want to run the taper through the planer. After running several of the strips through to reduce the thickness to 3/4", I accidentally ran a 10' length that varied from 7/8" at the feed end to about 1-1/2" at the thick end. It jammed in the infeed compression rollers and before I could hit the On/Off switch, it snapped one of the chain drive sprockets. Fortunately, they were easy to obtain and replace, but a lesson learned! Be careful to only run stock that has parallel faces that you want to thin, not a long taper! Unless you've got one of those monster Wadkins planers!
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  9. #9
    Hi and thanks for all the tips. To clarify the wood shop uses a big saw to rip all the boards that come in. Every board they mill first needs to be squared up, so it depends upon how far off square a board started on how much variance there is in thickness. Many of the strips run 3/16 on the thin side up to 3/4.
    I would try to get the strips grouped in to lots of similar thickness. Many of the strips are 10 feet long. I would be running only one strip at a time, through a consumer range planer.I have a small band saw, but that would take a long time. If I can trim to 4-6 feet or so I could keep the variance in thickness down to 1/4 inch or so.

    Many of the boards from old buildings and the shop does all the prep, making sure there are no nails, embedded rocks etc.

    I guess my questions should be;
    1) can a consumer level planer plane one strip at a time if the thickness varies.
    2) what is the biggest reasonable variance I could have in one strip.
    3) what can I expect for a feed rate on rough cuts.

    Thanks.
    Marty
    shenhui 900x1200 dual tubes 150 & 60

  10. #10
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    If you haven't yet, I would suggest figuring out what products you want to make before investing a bunch of time figuring out how to turn scraps into usable stock. What you make should drive how you mill. I hold on to scraps myself because I think there will always be a need, but, IMHO, that is pretty small scrap to try to do anything with if you are thinking in terms of turning a profit as a business.
    Brian

    "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger or more complicated...it takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction." - E.F. Schumacher

  11. #11
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    Sounds like the bundles that we put out every week, lol. That will be some expensive wood in terms of labor, but if you can select the strips individually and get the more uniform ones:

    1) portable planer: ~1/8" per pass, cast iron stationary planer: ~1/4" per pass BUT it is not really safe to feed strips that are narrower than the cut height on some portion. They can easily kick back or shatter and send debris flying.
    2) ~1/8", IMHO
    3) On edge - pretty fast - it will not be power limited. It will boil down to what quality level you need and the exact condition and type of head/knives in the planer.

    Good luck and thanks for doing your part to reduce the waste stream. We have one guy who takes ours for his kindling business, and another who uses the strips like you propose (as well as burning at least half of what he takes).

    PS: If you asked and offered to pay some minimal amount, they might be willing to make some uniform strips happen. We rip to certain widths and some boards leave 1" or more as a final waste strip. It is pretty simple to just send these strips through to 3/4" or whatever and set them aside, as long as the schedule allows.

    Quote Originally Posted by Martin James View Post
    Hi and thanks for all the tips. To clarify the wood shop uses a big saw to rip all the boards that come in. Every board they mill first needs to be squared up, so it depends upon how far off square a board started on how much variance there is in thickness. Many of the strips run 3/16 on the thin side up to 3/4.
    I would try to get the strips grouped in to lots of similar thickness. Many of the strips are 10 feet long. I would be running only one strip at a time, through a consumer range planer.I have a small band saw, but that would take a long time. If I can trim to 4-6 feet or so I could keep the variance in thickness down to 1/4 inch or so.

    Many of the boards from old buildings and the shop does all the prep, making sure there are no nails, embedded rocks etc.

    I guess my questions should be;
    1) can a consumer level planer plane one strip at a time if the thickness varies.
    2) what is the biggest reasonable variance I could have in one strip.
    3) what can I expect for a feed rate on rough cuts.

    Thanks.
    Marty
    Last edited by J.R. Rutter; 07-12-2014 at 9:30 AM.
    JR

  12. #12
    Thank you very much to everyone who has replied to this thread.
    From reading all the posts I can see that there are a number of issues to work out, and that beutifully finnished strips would probably not flow out of the other end of a lunch box planer.
    Brian, you comment that I should first figure out the products i want to make is a good one. But actually I usually do it the other way arround, learning or inventing the process and then making those products that fit best to that method for speed, cost, sellability and shippability.

    Today i plan on watching some youtube on planer tips and tricks.

    thanks for the suggestions
    marty
    shenhui 900x1200 dual tubes 150 & 60

  13. #13
    I also would comment that those sound like fairly thin strips of wood, but possibly I misunderstand the situation.

    Anyway, if they are thin strips, why not glue them together before planing and then send them through the planer? The advantage is now you have less feed/kickback problem, and you eliminate a second planing step after gluing previously independently planed strips. I have seen this done for drawer sides in utility cabinets. If your stock varies by more than 1/8" you are probably going to have to take more than one pass through the consumer-grade planer.

    If your stock in not flat (face jointed), planing will make it uniformly thick, but not much flatter. Planers will compress a lot of undulations, which will spring back leaving the planer. Don't want you to expect anything unrealistic from free offcuts.

  14. #14
    I think you will need a planer and a tablesaw. Tablesaw to make the pieces parallel, planer to thickness your panels. And lots of clamps. The Grizzly GO 453 planer is hard to beat for the money.

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