route jig for thickness planing?

[Bob]

Hi, I'm a bit of a newbie to this, but am starting a project that needs 1/2 inch stock and need to plane my 3/4 inch stock to thickness. I'm not fortunate enough to have a thickness planer and I suck at planning long wide boards to a constant even thickness. I've been thinking about it and wondered if I could somehow create a jig for my router and a flat bottom bit.

I remember a while back reading an article about how someone releveled their warped workbench using a similar jig, so am wondering if there are some shopbuilt jigs that could do this with smaller pieces. Most of my stock is

7 inches wide so my guess is that it's possible to build something that the router plate could run on and use the bit to take the stock down to a consistent thickness. I could try to design one myself but am hoping someone out there as been there and done that.

[Limp Arbor]

Flatten workbench

?id=3D33=38 idea for 'flattening' or thicknessing a board.

[Ed Bailen]

I just flattened a couple of 48" x 30" x 1.675" maple glue-ups with a router sled. The butcher-block desk tops were heavy enough that could just lay then on my workbench without fear of them moving. Three spacers were placed under the blank to make sure it did not rock. A couple of 2" angle irons were clamped to the bench top which left about 8" of free space on each side of the blank. I used some 1.5" angle iron for the cross pieces and made a new router base out of 1/4" masonite. The underside of the router base wah rough chamfered with a sander to clear the radius on the inside of the angle iron. I cut some spacers to set the correct distance between the two cross pieces so the inside spacing was about 1/2" wider than the router base. "C" clamps held the spacers to the 1.5" angle iron and they also let me clamp the cross pieces to the long (2") angle iron with spring clamps after I had moved the cross pieces and was ready to make another pass with the router (with a 3/4" flat cutting bit).

It was helpful to mill a spacer to help set the cross pieces between one pass and the next. A couple of pieces on low-friction tape on the bottom of the router base helped, and I blew all of the chips away with compressed air before moving the cross pieces. (At least during the first, roughing, pass. Subsequent passes didn't generate as much sawdust.

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