I am frustrated and feel limited without having a surface planer. I have a substantial pile of wood (birch, walnut, oak, and elm) which was given to me, but without a planer to dimension any of it, my projects have been limited to what dimensioning I can do with my TS, jointer, and ROS. Unfortunately, spending even $200 is not an option within the next 12 months, so I can't just go out and buy a planer. Does anybody have any experience in surfacing lumber with just a TS and jointer? I feel like no matter how much I practice, I'm not going to be able to get smooth parallel surfaces.
I'm going to guess you don't have a great TS, but if you can get it set up well enough you can do the following:
Joint 1 face Joint 1 edge Rip on the TS with the jointed face down and jointed edge against the fence. Run the board through on edge with the jointed face against the fence. You can make multiple passes and flip the board end for end to come in from the opposite edge.
This is highly dependent on the setup of the TS and having a good blade on it, and good technique feeding the board through. Attaching an auxilliary high fence to your fence will help a lot.
This would work, but will not leave a very good surface, and isn't particularly safe; there are any number of ways to get hurt. I wouldn't do it. Okay, I have done equally dangerous things, but try not to.
It's not really any different than resawing with the TS, except the blade is partially exposed on the edge instead of being inside the board. Which perhaps looks more dangerous, but isn't really when you think about it. With the high fence you've got something to hold the top of the board against, and you've always got at least half the width of the board to hold with your push block.
Alternatively you could make a sled that either rode against the fence or on the fence that would be something like a taper jig, but just a square tube with a fence on it. Clamp the board to it and run it through, with your hands safely on the other side. Would only work with relatively short boards though.
As far as the surface it leaves, the main issue is any ridge in the middle caused by any misalignment or deflection of the blade. Again, setup is crucial. You can get it pretty good, nothing that a ROS couldn't fix.
I don't have a planer, but I buy S4S or S3S and just have to correct whatever warping has happened. And I have my drum sander, but that takes rather a long time to thickness anything :)
Take up making medieval repro work. Great fun and a good excuse to only rough-surface things by hand!
You need a good workbench, robust enough for planing and with good _end_ clamping, such as dogs in movable dog holes (or else plywood scraps and G clamps)
You also need a scrub plane. Make one if you have to, by taking a cheap Stanley #4 and re-sharpening it with a wide mouth and a crowned iron. Use the worst old (or new!) beater you can find and don't be afraid to file the mouth wider.
Finally you need a set of winding sticks. Make your own, either beautiful mahogany ones with ivory inlay, or else some bits of aluminium extrusion from the window factory scrap-bins with black marker pen scrawled on them.
A copy of the old '50s Record handbook "Planecraft" is worth reading, otherwise Jeff Gorman's web site. Web searching will give you details on the tools.
Now go to work
Examine the board. Use the winding sticks, if appropriate. Look to see if there's cupping, twist or taper (either direction. Find an easy board first, one that has no more than mild cupping and not twist.
Ignore the awkward boards. Save them until you have a thicknesser, rip them smaller and easier to work with, or just find some better timber. Twisted timber isn't usually worth the effort, unless it's exotic or highly figured.
Do the first face on the jointer (as a surface planer). This gives you one accurate reference surface. I'd usually start from the concave side as this tends to sit on the planer bed more stably. If cupping is bad, knock the high spots down by hand first.
Now turn it over and start making it equally thick all over and taking out any twist or cup. Do this manually and it shouldn't even take long. Use your winding sticks to check how you're doing. Taper is your enemy here, as that means lots of hand planing. Don't worry about surface finish.
When it's done, stick your second face through the jointer (again, as a surface planer). This will give you a smooth surface. If it was parallel to begin with, then enough machine surface planing to make iit smooth shouldn't put a taper onto it. It won't _remove_ taper, but nor does it create it (for light cuts, with reasonable technique).
Snap a chalk line down the best edge, rip it and joint it. Only bother ripping one edge, because you don't know how wide the finished stock needs to be. I don't even do this much, until I'm ready to use the board. Much of my stock is stored as either 2" rough sawn waney edge, or dried and resawn S2S and still with the waney edges.
I resaw on the TS quite often, and think it is quite different. Resawing has material the near side of the blade, so it is much more stable. Planing leaves that big exposed blade, with little option but to use your hand near it (unless, as you say, you build some sort of sled). I am not saying it is hazardous, because with care it shouldn't be, but it is just more dangerous than woodworking ought to be.
Before I got my planer I did all my dimensioning on the table saw, and my thoughts are as follows:
It works. It takes a lot more time than a planer. For me, no matter how well it was set up and how careful I was, it was really really scary. It did leave a less consistent finish than the planer, which I took care of with hand planes.
If I didn't have this planer I'd still be using the TS to bring the wood to size, but boy do I appreciate this tool. Having an 8'' jointer and that discontinued DeWalt 733 planer have been a joy. Only use them at the beginning of the project but they make the whole project so much faster and so much less frustrating.
That said... I know I appreciate them so much because I made do with the TS and the hand planes for so long.
You've got the same amount of material on the edge, and with the high fence it's more like running something through the jointer, you're mostly just keeping it against the fence.
That's the "looks" more dangerous. That 1/4" of wood covering the blade in a resaw isn't going to help you if something goes wrong. Same danger, less illusion of their not being.
This effort can be reduced enormously by setting up a real scrub plane for fast stock removal.
The skill required can be reduced by using the planer to make it smooth and shiny afterwards, just using the manual effort to get the dimensions and shape right.
Got a router? Make a carriage to move the router over the wood after you first surface one face with your jointer, joint an edge then rip the other edge with your tablesaw.
I'm not trying to be a smart aleck, but is there anyway you could get a part time job on saturday nights or something like that, if money is that tight? Even at only $5-6/hour, it wouldn't take that long to save up $200-300. I think you are going to waste a lot of wood and have a lot of frustration otherwise.
I used a jointer and TS for years and never even considered a planer. The only limitation, of course, is the width of the finished piece. Another thought is to use eBay or Craigslist to search for a planer. I'm sure there are plenty of them knocking around doing nothing useful.
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