Watcha Makin'?

[Wlmedley]

I have a Dewalt 3 1/2" electric planer and I have had good luck with it on wide slabs. I usually go at a 45 degree angle across the surface to get it fairly flat and then finish with a sander. After finishing it still has slight ripples that you can see if you look at it a certain way but you can't feel them and I think it sort of adds to the look.Blades are fairly cheap and easy to change.

[WV Sawmiller]

Tom,

  The big drum sander sounds great. How well do they perform and hold up in exposed areas like I work in? I finished my last 2 tenons today with rain blowing in on my back. I bet they require more power than I have available from the one 110 V plug I have on the upright on my shed where I work. I tripped the breaker on my RAS last week. The breaker box is bout 300+ yards away on the other side of the creek. Remember I don't have a heated enclosed shop to work out of.

I have a Dewalt 3 1/2" electric planer and I have had good luck with it on wide slabs. I usually go at a 45 degree angle across the surface to get it fairly flat and then finish with a sander. After finishing it still has slight ripples that you can see if you look at it a certain way but you can't feel them and I think it sort of adds to the look.Blades are fairly cheap and easy to change.

Bill,

     From the pictures I see of them they look like they have a guide that runs along one edge. That would be in my way. I will look more at them in the store but I would need to be able to run them down the middle of a wide slab like I do my belt sander. Do they work that way?

[Wlmedley]

Howard ,there is a guide that comes with them but I have never used mine.You can run it across a slab just like you do your sander but I've found either running with the grain or at an angle works best. They will remove quite a bit of material pretty fast and I think they're pretty handy for a lot of things. I don't have a jointer and I use mine on edges and get pretty good results.

[aigheadish]

I'm a novice router user as well, WV, and I built a router sled as mentioned above. I'm much less nervous using it than using the router in normal fashion, though it seems I've tried some sketchy stuff, and built less than ideal jigs. The router sled is easy to make, you can break it down so it doesn't take much space (I have mine, I think 5-6' long, in three pieces that sit high up on a narrow shelf while not in use) and you can flatten things really nicely. There are some really extravagant designs out there but I just glued and screwed a few pieces of MDF together and it works really well. It's easy to find the high points and run them off. 

I've only used the electric hand planer a few times and while I'm fairly sure I'm not doing it right I have not achieved and ungrooved result that led me to belt sanding. The router sled leaves very little additional sanding.  

[Old Greenhorn]

Reading all the options here and factoring in your working conditions Howard while trying to think what is best and easiest for you to get a work around, I think the sled presents the best options as a jumping on point. 
 The planer takes a bit of skill to master for doing wide work and the skill can be frustrating to acquire without a hands on mentor/coach. I still can't do it well enough to use it often. The drum sander would be great and they can be found in 110V but you will search for a while before you find one and they take up the same amount of space whether running or not. Plus you need to get the belting for it.
 The carbide blade may not do exactly what you want unless you are taking more than 1/4" off the slab side.
 But the router sled can be made to hang on the wall out of the way when not in use. Just keep it dry is all.  You already have a router, and the sled setup itself is very useful for cookies and such as well as other things. The bits are not very expensive. You can make it in any size range you want or make a small one, then a larger one as you learn and advance. It is the least expensive (sorry) and the most likely to produce near perfect results out of the gate. I think your journey through this project would deserve a thread all it's own too.
-----------------------------

 On that hand power planer. I have a dewalt battery model with the fence, which I rarely use (the fence, that is). But I had some big WO slabs that I needed to join to make a wide (36") picnic table slab 9' long and 2-3/4 thick. I could not get them up on my jointer and get a good edge due to weight and size. So I took the fence and with some tweaking managed to get it pretty dead on 90° from the planer bed, then added a piece of nicely planed 3/4 cherry to increase the bearing surface. With care I could run that planer down the edge of those slabs, several time to create a straight, flat, square glue-up surface on both slab edges. To my amazement it worked and the glue line was dang near invisible over the 9'. 
 That dewalt has a groove guide down the center of the plane bed and I find it very handy for putting 45 bevels on the edges of beams and things, one pass is all you get, but for a lot of projects it can make it look real nice in no time at all.

[WV Sawmiller]

Thanks for the info. It sounds like I need to suck it up and start learning to use my router. It came with a table set up. I'll have to consider the sled idea when I have some level of comfort with it. Maybe after deer season ends. A man needs to keep his priorities straight.

I doubt I ever take off 1/8" so the carbide blade option is pretty much a non-starter for my needs.

[doc henderson]

If you have a router table, you can make the fence offset like a jointer and make a straight edge on that.  When I was a student, I had a folding table designed to mount a skill saw, jigsaw, and router to make a table tool.  Looked like the workmate stuff.

[Hilltop366]

To explain my carbide blade idea further.

I was watching a friend use his band mill a few months ago and after making a cut in a spruce log he noticed some deflection around some knots so he lowered the mill a tiny bit and made another pass with a bit slower feed rate, the blade was still visible during the cut so he was taking only a blade thickness + set or less in the cut and the finish was quite smooth which got me thinking about comments I have seen on the forum about carbide blades leaving a smooth finish so I figure that it would probably work even better for cleaning up / straightening / smoothing out / flattening / a chunk of wood and the width and length limit would be your saw mill.

The finish I saw with a regular blade would easily and quickly be sanded with ROS with 80 to 120 grit to knock off any loose fibres, if too clean of a look you could always put a couple of teeth out of set a bit to make it more rustic.

My thinking is it would be easier and faster to use this method than hand held planers, belt sanders or router sleds and cheaper than getting new equipment.

I would be tempted to try it with a regular blade making just a skim cut.

[doc henderson]

Heck Howard, you do everything else on the mill.  trim fingernails, cook eggs, shorten jeans into jean shorts, hopefully not WV short shorts (no pics please).

[aigheadish]

My setup, about as simple as it can get, and bigger than I'd usually need.

[Andries]

Don't listen to Doc - trimming your nails on the sawmill is a bad idea. He's just trying to drum up more medical business!
 😉
What aigheadish posted is what I use.
Howard, you'd mentioned that a router table came with your router. See that trough in the photo that aigheadish posted? Make the trough the same size as the router plate that fits into the table top opening. The router plate slides back and forth in the trough. Super safe, super quick and even less $$ than doing it any another way.
Try it - you'll like it.

[doc henderson]

Let's see a pic of that router table...please.  

[aigheadish]

If I remember I'll get it down and take some more pictures. Like Andries said, maybe my favorite part is how safe it feels. 

I'm pretty terrified of the router but using the sled felt nice and not scary the whole way through. You'll want a leaf blower or dust collection around. It'll make a mess of chips. 

[Magicman]

To explain my carbide blade idea further.

I have no idea what would happen with a carbide blade but I do know that taking a shim cut when the blade is not supported on both sides is usually not successful/smooth. 

[Hilltop366]

Well I guess my friend it unusual then.  I watched him do it 2 or 3 times.... now it was with a Norwood mill with ceramic guides so maybe that was the difference but the spruce came out very flat and smooth each time. The bit of wave at the knots was not much from the original cut as it could be cleaned up with just skimming over it but he is very fussy about the lumber he puts out so he would rather take the time to fix it.

[Andries]

Router table, gray plate holds the router beneath.

Router and mounting plate tipped out of the table-top recess.

[Andries]

Router sled on a shelf in storage.
Sized for the router mounting plate - leave the router attached when sledding or in table.
 "Sledding" is a Canadian thing, done in the winter = Inside, woodstove perking, cuppa hot Java and good tunes on the Spotify.
Centre slot for cutter bit.
Holes in sled to 'wipe' chips to the floor.
Make it fancy or make it quick; either way it's a cheap jig to have in any shop.

[Andries]

The one-half inch bit that came with the router. Works really well but takes a thousand passes to smooth a wide bench.

[Andries]

Yep, THIS is better.
A two inch wide bit.
Four times fewer passes to smooth off the wide benches.
 Costa bit, but sometimes, time is money.
And sometimes, I can't stand tedious repetition cause I'm an old fart in a hurry.

[aigheadish]

Andries- Your sled looks way nicer than than mine. I like the holes on the side for moving chips away. 

I also bought a less beefy but 2" bit, I think it cost me around 30-40 bucks, my guess is I'll never have to buy another or it'll be a long time. I can't imagine using a half inch bit.

[Old Greenhorn]

I finished off two of these today, a 1" thick RO cookie with an inset mirror from the back. A float coat of epoxy all over. I have done these 2-3/4 think and 1" but he 1" sells a lot faster than the thick ones. I sold two thick ones at my last show, so I was out. Some I've done with bark and some without.
 I think I am going to resaw all the thick stock I have to just make the thinner ones. I got a bunch of cookies off this single short log and they all dried with just minor cracking that is easily filled with epoxy. 

[RetiredTech]

Nothing grand, just a place to sit and watch.
  I've been hunting the last few years out of a second hand hunting tent. It was maybe 4'x4' and 5 foot tall. At the end of last year the scraps that were left were retired. There just wasn't enough duct tape in the world to repair it.  I scavenged the fiberglass pole frame for other projects and said I would build something to hunt out of for this year. Well, I may not finish in time but I made a start on it. Here's the floor. All oak I milled from our property. The base is the worst of the worst oak 4x4's I had and 3 crooked 2x4's. The floor is 1x material. I wanted to plane them all the same thickness, but they had started to cup. I screwed them down flat on the frame with the help of some clamps and used a hand plane to smooth the transition between the different board thicknesses then hit it lightly with a ROB sander. I'm sure they will shrink over time but that's OK. The short butt log was sawed last spring. The floor is 5' x 6'. I'll probably put my battle ship gray floor paint on it tomorrow if the weather is better. I got rained out this afternoon.
  My plan is a simple box with board and batten siding supplied by a sweet gum tree that blew over near the house a few years ago and is hung up in the trees around it. Some roots are still in the ground and it has put leaves on the every year since.


Yep, Like everything else it's sitting on the end of my mill. I really need to build a workshop and/or a sawmill shed!

[Magicman]

I'm glad that you didn't run outta nails.    

[RetiredTech]

  Looks like my little hut is on hold again. I went out to walk the dog yesterday and had a nice half grown sow in one of my snares. We got her skinned out and in the walk in cooler then found out the compressor was bad on my cooler. We had enough ice to get it cooled down but I need to fix the cooler before deer season gets here.

[beenthere]

"nice half-grown sow in one of my snares" 

Hmmm??  Trying to interpret if what you are saying is you have set snares to catch wild pigs and caught a gilt (not yet a sow). Am I close? 

Tell us more, please