End grain versus a planer?

[Edwin Pawlowski]

I'm making a cutting board (Wood Magazine plans) and it consists of 7 strips of wood glued together, then cut and glued up as 24 pieces so the end grain is on the cutting surface. The glue up was not as perfect as I'd like. I cleaned up one side with a belt sander. The ideal took would be a drum sander and it would be perfect in a few passes.

I got to thinking that I could save a lot of time with a couple of passes through the planer, but . . . . . I figure I'd probably get a lot of tearout and possibly even ruin the planer blades.

My plan is to make five of the cutting boards for Christmas gift. The glue up has two strips of walnut, two cherry, three maple

[Tom Watson]

Ed:

Could you hot melt a couple of rails onto the glued up panel that stand maybe a quarter inch proud and then run that over the dado blade with real light passes on the ts until it was leveled out enough to start sanding?

I------I

Regards,

Tom Watson

tjwatson1ATcomcastDOTnet (real email)

[Toller]

And here i thought I invented that cutting board concept a couple years ago! I planed mine. It works, but plan on losing a good inch to tear out. The planer blades will tear hunks off the trailing edge. Didn't do any harm to the planer though. It is "interesting", but there is a reason people don't make them that way...

[Leon]

I built a couple of those and posted the pictures. If you run them through the planer you will get terrible tear out on the trailing edge.

I also plan on making more. I think this time however if I want to build 2, I will double the thickness of the cross cuts so that the cutting board will be twice as thick. If I want 3 I will triple the length of the cross cut sections and make it 3 times thicker.

Then trim slabs off on the Band Saw for each cutting board. Less glue up time and less sanding.

[Edwin Pawlowski]

That may just do it. I don't need much, but a sander is just time consuming. Thanks.

[Robatoy]

On Nov 14, 11:44 pm, "Leon" wrote: [snip]

Show-off.

r

[George]

The carry bars and a chamfered edge will help, but the real tailed answer is a drum sander or an overhead rig like a Saf-T-Planer or router sled and mortising bit.

I've got a low-angle Jack, and then there's the plane designed for the purpose, the "block" plane. Takes less time than you think.

[Mike]

I remember seeing a setup that used two rails attached to the sides of the piece, and a really wide sub base for a router that would span the rails. Using a flat bottom cutter, you just move the thing all over the surface of the board until you've hit all of it.

I know that I have a magazine at home that has detailed info on this - it's either Wood or Workbench - I'll try to find it this evening.

Mike

[efgh]

Sounds like something I created to flatten/smooth one face of a board. It's just a piece of plywood that's about 10" wide with two rails about

1.25" high screwed on the outside edges of the plywood. I place the wood in between these rails and use a couple of screws to hold it place. I took another piece of plywood, traced the bottom of the router onto this piece of plywood, routed out about 0.25" so the router would fit, put a couple of stops on the bottom, put a flat bottom cutting bit in the router and flattened a board.

[ed_h]

I made a fairly large table top this way. To solve the tearout problem, I screwed sacrificial strip of wood on the trailing edge of the glued up assembly. Sharp cutters help, too.

Edw> I'm making a cutting board (Wood Magazine plans) and it consists of 7 strips

[George]

Repeating, if you chamfer the edge, there's nothing for the knives to catch on to and tear away. You're probably going to round it afterward anyway to avoid the same. Put your sacrificial boards alongside the piece, perpendicular to the knives to keep it from tipping into the blades when it transitions from infeed roller or into the outfeed. Standard snipe prevention method.

[Peter Huebner]

Not necessarily.

1. make sure the tables are aligned and the blades are SHARP.
2. set cutting depth very fine, maybe 1/2 mm or less
3. do a short cut on the arse end first (um, the trailing end, sorry) then turn the piece around and run it over the planer - you should not get any tearout at all.

I've cleaned up frame_and_panel cabinet doors and sides this way and if you're careful it works just fine, but I ran into serious trouble when one of the joiner tables got out of whack due to a brass bush slipping in an aluminium casting.

-P.