screaming planer

[Josiah Bartlett]

Old floor boards seem to get work hardened, from a combination of years of being walked on(compressing the fibers), finish soaking in and hardening, and from dirt and grit being ground into the pores. If I'm planing old floorboards I like to knock the finish off with a belt sander first, but even then they are pretty tough to plane.

I've found that my Delta 22-580 develops more power when it is plugged right into a 20 amp outlet rather than trying to run it off even a 25 foot 12 gauge extension cord. The motors in portable planers seem to be really sensitive to line voltage sag.

[Ray McCullie]

Maybe you should try sanding them down a little first. I've seen Norm use a sander on NYW. It's like a planer but instead of blades it has two cylinders, each with a different grit of paper. Makes cleaning up old board easier or so he says.

Maybe if you clean up the boards a little with a belt sander it'll make them easier to plane. Of course they could be hardened to a point where they are unworkable. Just remember the wood you get today almost isn't even the same species as old growth wood. Most modern lumber is cut from immature trees and the wood just doesn't have the same properties.

Good luck, sounds like you'll need it.

[Michael MacDonald]

I will try sanding them down instead... I have a HF belt sander, and I understand these devices have tenuous lives--so I expect I might be visiting HF with a dead sander soon given how these boards fight against being worked.

Actually, the first board I was trying to plane was a riser--so no actual foot traffic on it. I would expect the treads to be even harder to mill.

I put this task aside for a couple of days while I worked on a few others things. Last night I had the need to plane a 6-foot, 13-inch-wide QS white oak glue-up--same as all the other new stair treads and risers I have been making. I wasn't taking off more than 1/64, but immediately the planer dug in again. Ended up with a shallow concave cut about one inch in from the edge of on the board... hmmm.

Tried it again, and got the same result. The only way I could get the board to run through was to raise up the height. Then the rollers sent it through, but the blade did not touch it... As soon as I had the blades make the slightest contact, the whole machine got bogged down.

So I opened up the planer and checked out the blades. Now my eyesight is not so great, and I wasn't confident by looking or touching them that they were more dull than the other side... but for kicks I thought I would flip the blades to use the other side and see if that made a difference--and it did. The new QSWO board turned out fine...

So in the end, I think the old riser was perhaps just too tough for the blades--the blades either dulled quickly or perhaps were bent slightly. Is this really possible? I don't want to make a foolish conclusion, but I had heard that wood hardened over a long time (aside from compression), and perhaps these treads and risers are just rock solid now... I hadn't seen any problems with planer prior to this riser. Can't wait to see how the TS deals with them.

Is it possible for wood to become unworkable because of this condition? I would rather think that the problem arises from some I did wrong (not cleaning up the varnish, planing the wrong side such that the board rocked, taking too much bite in the first pass)

I want to use the red oak... not give up on it. But I don't want it to kill my planer either...

[Michael MacDonald]

I found this:

http://www.woodworking.com/ww/Articl...der__5887.aspx

these guys say no. my treads were hard to begin with. Doesn't rule out compression as a factor, but age itself as a factor is contradicted...

[Lee Schierer]

Before you plane any more boards wax the lower table with paste wax. It will help the boards slide better. You may need to re-wax several times to keep the boards moving well. It makes all the difference in the world on my planer when you wax the table.

[Michael MacDonald]

Lee -- I only did it once... I will put more wax on and let it dry more this time... certainly can't hurt. Hadn't occured to me before, but perhaps the finish was grabbing on the table.