Maching rounded edge on planks

Well your phrases were:

"but entirely the wrong tool for rounding board edges. Unless you really don't give a dry brown thing how they look."

and

"I've enough experience of disc sanding & ags to think the odds of that low"

Which I read as fairly strong discouragement. I was just countering that in not completely unskilled hands, the chances of successfully rounding over the corners of some bench slats with an angle grinder were in fact pretty damn good. It may not be the first choice of tool, but if its what is to hand, then it will do a decent enough job.

Hint: Rounding over an edge is not a finish sanding operation. You would do the finish sanding after. As mentioned elsewhere a foam sanding block will tidy it up nicely.

yup. No-one said it was impossible.

sure, I don't disagree. But when an OP is asking how to round the edge/corner of wood it does not indicate that they are skilled. I've seen enough disc sanding by the unskilled to not recommend it myself.

Yes you can. But it's easier for an unskilled diyer to do it in one move, which is what would happen with the more usual ways, ie router or moulding plane.

NT

Which had all already been suggested by various people including you before you decided to go off on the whole "AG Bad!" campaign to what was probably a tongue in cheek post from David in the first place.

Hence I thought it worthwhile countering the sentiment since, perhaps counter intuitively, an AG will do a decent enough job and not everyone would necessarily consider it.

I am reminded of the old joke about the academic crying "Yes, yes, I know it works in /practice/ but does it work in /theory/?" :)

like Bumble bees being able to fly?

Excellent - thank you John. Looks like a fine job to me :)

Actually, my suggestion of using an AG for rounding bench slats was entirely serious. Should I be ashamed that it was the first tool that sprung to my mind, and would probably have been the tool I'd have used? ;)

David

Well given the tradition in the group, I needed to allow for the possibility. :-)

No need to be ashamed - you can do surprisingly fine work with an AG - especially with the wide range of abrasives, and polishing / finishing discs and pads available these days.

Obviously no-one said AGs were bad.

Matty (from NZ) was quite the artist with an angle grinder.

Tim

Okay.

Now, in order of decreasing price and decreasing desirability, all cheaper than a cheap router and cutter:

Not arguing with the angle grinder, just saying.

(I'd round off all the undersides with the angle grinder first, so as to have my hand well in when it comes to the visible side.)

Thomas Prufer

All I did for this worktop was to roughly round it with an ordinary flat plane. That of course left me with half-a-dozen steps around the curve. Which a couple of minutes with some sandpaper was near-as-dammit a smooth curve.

Now of course I'm noticing that it isn't quite the same along the entire length, and it'll bother me...

... but not enough to improve it. (My intention was to give it another coat of oil once the weather warmed up, but I'm now working full time on what was supposed to be my "clean workbench")

Andy

Yeah, I was thinking of him when I wrote that, but am ashamed to say I could not recall his name ("Matty F" IIRC now) at the time...

(sadly many of the images he posted have now expired on tinypic)

I've done it with a surform and permagrit sanding block when lacking anything else

OK But first he would have to teach himself how to sharpen the plane and then how to set it up and finally how to use it correctly. I think how to use a trim router might be easier

Sounds like a job for my angle grinder :-)))

He would have to teach himself how to set up and how to use the trim router, also too as well.

Go the wrong way round, and the edge is a mess. Go too fast, and you end up tearing and sanding a lot, go too slow and you get burn marks from the cutter or the pin. Go too deep and then turn over the slat, the bearing pin runs on the routed bit and not the flat, leading to the top and bottom being different. Sometimes just a bit -- as I noted after mounting them randomly, and it looking a mess.

Routing narrow slats is a PITA, no way to easily fix them and just go round. Non-slip mats help, but they get dusty and slip...

Thomas Prufer

As with any tool. Practice on some scrap first!

For roundover cutters, there is *lots* of latitude IME - they are not usually heavy cuts.

A decent bearing guided cutter rather than a pin type is infinitely preferable IMHO. It gives a better result overall, and is much less likely to burn with a low feed rate.

Router table is the way forward for lots of thin bits. That way you are not relying on the bearing or the pin to get the registration from the edge, and the clamping problem goes away.

In my case, it was a bearing-type in a large Festo. Routed both sides of 19mm or so, edge radius five or ten mm, put it up, saw it wasn't symmetric... aaaargh. (Wasn't important or really visible to anyone but myself, so I left it for quite a few years.)

At the time, I had access to a saw-shaper, with a shaper head and also a feed unit. That, a feather board or three, made from scrap and a bandsaw, and a some time, and there's your idiot-proof production setup for repetitive work. And, the pros warned me: sometimes you are making *many* of something. And once you get from hundreds to thousands, everyone turns into an idiot: the mind wanders, you lose count, and then you are already down at the pub in your head while shoving the last hundred through.

Most of the stuff I made was for myself, small one-offs, didn't know if it'd work, knock it together quick. So, "round off the edge" or "put a bevel on it" was mostly "shove it against the edge sander" -- because that's the five-second way forward:-) and gives good, consistent results (after many poor, inconsistent results, i.e. practice.) But once in while, if the router were out already, I'd hold the lath down on the nearest workbench, run the router round with the other

-- and was grateful for the soft-starter:-)

Thomas Prufer