Planer as a jointer

[Bill Green]

Just looking for a cheaper way to skin the cat, so to speak. (My apologies to cat lovers)

Jim

No apologies needed. From what I hear cathide makes the best banjo heads. You'd need to skin 'em somehow

[tod evans]

cats ain`t bad on rice either

[Darren Vass]

Do you have a pic of the sled. I could not find any link to the article on FWW any longer and the video is now not online anymore.

Thanks,

Darren

[Matt Day]

Do you have a pic of the sled. I could not find any link to the article on FWW any longer and the video is now not online anymore.

Thanks,

Darren

I don't have a pic for you, but it's pretty easy to picture in your head. The "sled" I use is simply a 3/4" piece of MDF that's about 6" longer on each end. The wood that's getting planed gets put on top of this sled, but to keep it from rocking back and forth you need to wedge small pieces of wood under the high parts. Make sure that when you do this you're on a flat surface, b/c MDF has some flex.

On the feed end of the MDF I'll put a nail (make sure it's lower than the top of the board!) for the board to push against when it's getting pulled through by the rollers.

This worked great on a table top I'm finishing now (I used 8' boards).

[John Lubeski]

I with the hand plane guys on this one, except my technique might be a little different. I don't use a #7 or 8 plane, since all you need to do is get board so that it will sit flat on your bench top without rocking or big gaps. (it doesn't need to be completely cleaned up and perfectly flat)To do this you sometimes need to really hog off some wood, and a scrub plane works wonderfully for that, once I scrub down any high spots, I will sometimes use a #5 just to knock down the scrubs ridges, but just as often, I'll run the board though the planer right after scrubing it. Plane the board until the other side is cleaned up nicely, then flip the board and clean up the side that was hand planed.

I just used this technique last night on a 11" wide, 2+" thick, 6ft long chuck of oak which had a far amount of cup and a bit of twist. I probably took me 30min to completely flatten and surface both side. It might not be as fast as a big jointer would be, but I bet its quicker than try to set up a sled, and a heck of a lot easier to store. Good workout too!