I am planning to make a drop leaf table with three sections about 20" wide. I am figuring I'll make it from 4-6" stock that is glued together, however, I don't have either a joiner or a planner. Can I get acceptable results just touching up the edges with a table saw and then sanding the top after it is glued to compensate for the lack of a planer?
I've gotten away with it by selecting my stock carefully from the S4S piles. I'd rather bug SWMBO's uncle for his jointer, but I don't wanna abuse the priveledge, so I select more often than joint.
If you have a good quality saw blade and a good fence, you can get glue-line rips.
Sanding works, but depending on your finish, you might want to be extra careful with your squeezeout. I use 50-grit paper in my palm sander to cover up my mistakes.
Absolutely. As long as you take pains in selecting dimensioned stock that is the _exact_ same thickness, 20" wide glue-ups should not pose a big problem for handwork.
For your rips, make sure that your table saw/fence/blade is properly aligned and take pains in setting the blade at 90 degrees. Make the tops oversize in both length and width and rip/crosscut to final dimensions after the glue up. Take care in getting your glue-up as flat as possible with cauls or weights ... good cabinet clamps make this easy. Scrape the glue joints down with one of those blade changeable scrapers, and use a hand scraper and/or plane and sand to get your final level surface.
While it would be nice to find a cabinet shop with a large drum sander, it is not unreasonable to do it all by hand if necessary ... it is amazing what you can do with a little effort and a card type scraper that is properly edged.
Curtis - search this group for a similar question and responses during the past week or two. My response, and I think consensus was that you can get a good edge cut, suitable for gluing, with a well adjusted table saw and a sharp blade. Again, see previous posts for detailed suggestions.
Also, if you can get your hands on a biscuit cutter, it can help reduce the surface offset.
Curtis, edge quality is less of an issue than edge straightness. Quality can be easily improved via sanding, hand planing, etc. The key thing you want is parallelism with the edge you are gluing to. Both pieces could be wavy as long as both are complementarily wavy.
If you have a hand plane then (even if it is only a block plane) you can mate your edges, mark the high spots (where the edges touch) and carefully remove the high spots taking very shallow cuts with the plane. When you plane the edge, plane both edges at once (with the two pieces clamped together and the 'top' of both pieces on the inside). This way, any slight tilt you may have in your plane will be compensated as both pieces will have a complementary tilt which will cancel.
If you work carefully, taking a couple of passes to keep improving the edge, you will have a nice glue edge fairly quickly without a jointer, no noise, and a very satisfying feeling.
TWS
A planer is not really needed. But, you can get by with a good hand plane. Be extra fussy when you butt the boards dry-fitted together--it's too late after the glue is applied.
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