jointers for newbie

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I am a newbie to woodworking. I have acess to free rough cut oak boards from a flooring manufacturer. My dad brought me some 2.5 inch wide 1 inch thick and verying lengths long. I also have some wider boards.
Can a true flat edge be achieved with one of those hand planers or a hand planer that plugs into the wall? I would love a jointer but Not sure if I could afford it and then I would probably still need a planer.
Is this wood good for anything. It is all oak, I think white.

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With a good manual jointer plane you can achieve a relatively flat surface. Typically the electric ones are too short to easily get a flat surface. The delema however is that not even a full size electric jointer is the proper tool for flattening the opposite side of the board. Flattening the opposite side of the board is normally done with a thickness planer.
I would love a jointer but Not
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Correct.
Absolutely. Great sizes for face frame material for cabinets and cabinet door rails and stiles.

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A hand plane, yes (the cordless variety that was been around for a couple hundred years). People used that technique for a long time quite successfully. It does, however, require much more sweat, and skill (not just use but sharpening and tuning). You also need a good holding mechanism to secure your work, usually, this is a traditional bench.
Low-tech has its place, but it's not necessarily a really big money saver.
As for the plug-in variety, it's really a different animal. It's designed to true up the jack studs in the rough opening for a door or window installation. It's not what you want for this application.

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Look for a post from JOAT about jointing with a planer. That narrows down to one tool until you can ju$tify $pending for both. Forget the hand electric planer. There are hand planes made for jointing the way it was done long before electricity was invented. They will cost about 1/3 the price of a 6" jointer.
Any free wood is good wood. At 2 1/2" you will have to do more glue ups but it can be done and you can make all sorts of things that way. It is possible to make entire projects with no wood wider than a couple of inches.

Edwin Pawlowski wrote:
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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Conservative pundits claim Edwin Pawlowski said he invented electricity. But it's not true. I think he said he played a role in the creation of it (while rubbing his sneakers on the carpet?).
It's different.
er

stryped wrote:
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planer.
Both edges and faces were joined/planed (straightened/flattened) by hand long before electricity was around. Takes time and practice. And the longer the plane the better. Even if you later get power tools, learning to do it by hand is a good thing. Trouble is, good hand planes have gotten ridiculously expensive. I built all sorts of stuff - both big and small - with just hand tools long before I got stationary power tools.
You can also do the edges with a router or saw by clamping a straight edge (like the factory edge of plywood) to the board and using it as a guide to trim your board. ____________
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Sure, it's good for all sorts of stuff. White oak is strong, flexible and reasonably rot resistant. It also looks better - not great but better - than red oak IMO. It is a nice wood.
One thing you should *NOT* do is use iron/steel fasteners with it...oak is acidic and the reaction with the iron causes black stain. Use solid (not plated) stainless steel, bronze or brass. The strongest is SS, next is bronze, brass is quite weak but looks nice.
-- dadiOH ____________________________
dadiOH's dandies v3.06... ...a help file of info about MP3s, recording from LP/cassette and tips & tricks on this and that. Get it at http://mysite.verizon.net/xico

You have nice wood at the best price there is. But first settle on what you want to make before you decide which tool(s) to buy.
Jointers and planers are great but they're not cheap, as you know. So turn your lack of funding into a virtue: build things that will show well with a hand-tooled look. Whether picture frames or table tops or boxes, there is a certain appeal to a textured, almost wavy hand planed surface. I don't mean to suggest that you should do all your planing by hand (though you certainly could), it's just that you can speed up the process by using one of those electric hand planers if only to clean up the sawmill marks on your rough stock and then turn to a decent hand plane or two for edge jointing and a hand scraper for finish work. I guess what I'm driving at is don't aim for machine made perfection unless and until you can afford all the machines that permit it to happen. Where some see imperfection, others see art.
J.
stryped wrote:
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These are probably already quite flat, but their surface is rough. You can smooth them with a hand plane, like a Stanley #4 or #5 (cheap off eBay, search this group for buying advice). Generally a longer plane is used for flattening, a short plane for final smoothing. For true "jointing" (putting accurate edges on things so you can glue them together) than a long #7 plane is used.
Don't use a hand held electric planer. These are a tool of very limited usefulness, because their power far outstrips their control. They're usually a good way to cut divots in your timber, unless you're very practiced in using one.
A thickness planer is worth buying when you have the space and money. This is really the tool for turning cheap timber into usable materials. They can pay for themselves quickly, if you're doing a lot of work and have access to cheap rough timber.
Another technique is to choose what you're making. A bit of medieval reproduction looks much harder than it really is to make, and the tools are very simple.