I'm making a chess board out of multiple strips of wood. Conventional wisdom says use nine strips of each color, rip into strips, slide, then cut off the extra squares on the ends.
I just figured out the hard way why conventional wisdom says that. I tried to save material, and thought I was being clever. I cut them a little long, glued them up, then cut them into checkered strips of the proper width, and rotated every other one 180 degrees. I have a nice looking board with a lot of potential, but now I have to get myself around a couple of thorny problems:
1) the squares aren't all flat and level by a long shot, so the board needs a good deal of planing... having the grain all going the same way sure would have been handy... I think I'm probably doomed to face horrible tearout, though I haven't yet tried my luck.2) the edges after the second glue-up are a little off. I whacked them against a straight edge before clamping, but there were minute variations, and when I put a piece of frame against those two edges, the little gaps stick out like a sore thumb.
For #1 I'm thinking maybe plane it anyway, get it flatish, then remove the tearout by renting a portable belt sander. Any better ideas?
I have a contemporary #4 that's my de facto scrub because it's better for ugly work than smoothing. I have a 1960-era #5 that can take a pretty thin shaving, but I don't think it's up to tackling this grain either. Could I do this with a scraper? Am I likely to get a scraper to work well enough to do this job with no previous experience using them? Or maybe try that router surface flattening jig?
My router is a piece of crap that will *not* hold a depth setting, so that complicates matters. It might be the best way to go, the more I think about it. I've proven to myself that while I think planes are fun to use, I really do absolutely *suck* at using them for anything more complicated than truing the edge of a board or planing a very narrow face. If it's wider than my plane iron, I'm going to f*ck it up *horribly*. That's just a fact right now.
Dealing with #2 is quite thorny. Owing to minute variations between the two times I set my rip fence, even checking it myriad times and using both a combination square and a spacer block to ensure the same setting, the "squares" are all 1/64" wider than they are long. The extra size adds up to 1/8" of extra length on the board, and it's in the direction opposite the rough edges. This means if I trim the edges to even them out the board will become even more rectangular than it already is.
I could trim, say, 1/16" all the way around the board, I guess. It might not be too obvious. Another idea is to attempt to put a tiny overhang on the frame members so that they cover 1/16" of the board and hide the gaps. This again takes space away from the perimeter squares. Of more concern, I'm afraid of executing it poorly. I'm envisioning a small, thin overhang, and it would be exceedingly easy to break it off with whatever I use to craft it, whether it be the table saw, router, or chisels. Removing 1/16" from the board might be safer. Or maybe 1/32". I haven't actually measured to see just how small an amount I can remove. I could tolerate a tiny gap here, but the current gap is much too obvious. Planing all that endgrain is out because I don't have a block plane. The way they line up, it would be hard to plane anyway. It's like the edges of the boards weren't square going in, so there's a little triangular divot at every joint.
Well, anyway, there it is. I'm on my second attempt as it is, and I have four days tied up in this. I want to use this one if I can come up with a way to save it. If not, I can cut it back up and make more turning blanks out of it I guess. At least I took notes on what to avoid next time.
Learning is expensive, and time consuming.