I am buying alot of quartersawn white oak in the rough and I had a question. I need to mill it in my Delta 12" planner but since both the top and bottom are rough is there a proper way to ensure I have a flat board when I finish milling it. The lumber does not have a smooth surface on the bottom when I first put it into the planer but I want to make sure that it remains flat as I mill it so when it it flipped over to do the other side the board is flat or does it matter. Thanks, Mike
Technically you need a jointer to smooth the edge and one surface. You make the opposite edge parallel to the jointed edge with you TS. You make the opposite surface that you made smooth with the jointer smooth and parallel with the thickness planer.
That said, I have successfully done what you propose with "flat" rough stock and only a planer for the top and bottom surfaces.
jointer first then planer. thasts the rule BUT you can do it with just a planer if you make a sled for the planer and use scraps to support the high spots. the planers feed rollers will press the wood to the table and whatever bow or bend or twist is present will still be there thats why the sled. it can be done but it is a fiddly process so if you are only doing a little go for it. if a lot you may want to invest in a jointer or a good hand plane to flatten the first face.
All boards are cupped, but for some you must put a straight edge across the width to be able to tell which way.
When you have determined which side is the high side, put that side up when feeding it into the planer. You say that your boards are quartersawn but they probably still have an apparent grain direction. Feed them into the planer so that the blade will hit them on the upslope of the grain - that is "going with the grain" - this will save you from most tearout.
When you have run the high side off of your board, flip it over and plane the other side. It is important to try to take equal amounts of wood from each face, as boards usually have a different level of moisture in the center and running more of the wood off of one face than the other will reinstitute the cup.
When you are done you should stack the wood, rather than stand it up or leave individual pieces sitting unstacked. If your wood is still reasonably green, you should separate the boards with "stickers" which are pieces of stock that have achieved their equilibrium moisture content, I prefer rips of ply - but don't use cherry, because it will stain the oak. Softwood ply rips will not be a problem and, if you have any mdf rips, they are perfect.
Weight the stack, or band it, if you have that ability. If you choose banding, and your stock was juicey to begin with, you will have to reband as it loses moisture.
Just shove it through the planer, keep turning the boards over, don't use excessive pressure and watch your technique.
A thickness planer will make flat smooth boards for you - you don't need a wide jointer. The only ones it will have trouble with are twisted boards, but then you probably don't want to be using these anyway (if it's quartersawn and twisted, something bad went wrong somewhere). It's usually best to either scrap such a board, or saw it down to extract the stable portion before planing.
If you're careful, you can take cupping out perfectly well by a thickness planer. Just don't crank the pressure on, or you distort it more than you machine it. If it's badly cupped, you may get better timber utilisation as two narrow boards, rather than planing all the thickness out to remove the cup.
A wide jointer is great if you have it, bit you _can_ do this without.
To save a lot of time, use a hand-held powered planer to knock down the high points of a cupped board (or a scrub). This is the only use I have for a powered planer.
Looked at this web site, very impressed with all the work that went into this tutorial.
I am in the same situation but with a lot of walnut and cherry, some of which is 8/4 up to 12/4. I need some of that thickness but want to resaw some of it to get down to thinner stock.
Where in the multi-step process would I do the resaw operation? It would seem that I need at least one good edge and face, correct? Would that be he step to go to resaw or should I take the stock all the way to 4 square and then resaw and plane the resawn face?
Sorry. I might have missed the original message. There was some discussion on this a while back. If you can cut to length first, and not too long, this might work. It was suggested by soemone else. I tried it, and it worked like a charm:
Have a piece of 3/4" MDF that will let the board sit on it. Hold to the best position by eye to lose the least waste. Shim into place, and "spot-weld", or run a line with hot glue. Judge for yourself how much to use. No need to overdo it though. Run through the planer [note the spelling] a little at a time until one side is done.
The board and glue are readily removed from the MDF and the wood, and the MDF is reuseable. Flip over to do the other side.
I have a Delta 12 1/2" planer. Last year I had to have it rebuild after two years of use. These types of surface planers are not designed for heavy work. They are intended for finish work. When milling air dried hardwood lumber I can only remove a
1/64" or less in one pass. If your lumber has not been well stacked when air or kiln drying many boards will be distorted (crook, bow, cup and twist). If this is the case either you have a powerful surface planer or spent all day on a 12-13 light duty planer removing 1/64 or less at a time. When I am in a rush I use my heavy duty 6" jointer to remove as much distortion as possible before doing the final surface planing. When I have more time, I go to a hardwood flooring mill where they have a machine that surface four sides of a max width of 6 " in one pass. They charge me 0.07 cents per linear foot X 6" wide. Then I bring the milled lumber home and use my Delta 12-1/2 to do the final finish. Knowing what I know now I would have invested in a industrial planer. As a norm I now finish the board to a
7/8" thickness instead of 3/4". Sometime where structural strength is require I finish to 1" thick.
Seems that all you'd _really_ need is one face, no? Except that you're usually planning to glue up the thinner pieces, in which case it's a damn good idea to join/rip/optional join while thicker.
If I only get one face jointed then I am still trying to resaw with a "bad" edge sliding on the bandsaw table.
Looks like a minimum would be to to do an edge and a face, put the good edge down and good face against the fence and resaw. But would it be better from a material handling standpoint to resaw after doing the four square.
To square the second edge, it only takes a minute to make a pass on the tablesaw. If you only have one face jointed, you have to run the board through he planer to get the face flat again. It is much easier to do this if the other face is already planed and parallel. Best to take the extra time up front rather than to try and correct errors later.
Depends on what you're referencing, I guess. I use a tall pivot and reference the flat face only for those times when I'm trying to get the "natural" look, or when I might have a particular grain match that only a couple lines ripped later can accomplish..
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