When to plane

You'd be best off to joint, square and plane your stock before gluing up the panels. You'll get tighter and more consistent joints, and you won't have to plane as much off this way. Check out this web page to get an idea why this is the case:

-AD

I would plane them to thickness first, cut to length, joint the edges and then glue up. The reason I would not glue up first and then send it through a planer is you will likely get tearout from the grain going in different directions on different boards.

good luck, Frank

Gluing stock which is a bit over thickness can compensate for a bit of misalignment as it is planed to final. The OP will have to determine if his stock is ready for gluing as purchased. I would rather glue up the stock which will be crosscut to become panels rather than plane short pieces.

You need one flat face and one square edge on each board for a glue-up. Anything more, like parallel sides or faces is gravy.

If you're gluing up more than two boards side-by-side to make a panel, all of the inner boards need *both* edges square, straight, and parallel.

-- Regards, Doug Miller (alphageek-at-milmac-dot-com)

Get a copy of my NEW AND IMPROVED TrollFilter for NewsProxy/Nfilter by sending email to autoresponder at filterinfo-at-milmac-dot-com You must use your REAL email address to get a response.

How perceptive. Did you come up with that on your own?

plain 1/16 off before, to make sure there the same thickness then glue and then plain the remaining 1/16, that way it's really 5/8 thick all the way across

"dugger4" wrote in news:SD8td.3671$wp.327@lakeread05:

Since you have access to a wide planer, and you're only going to take off 1/8", I would glue up first, then plane to thickness. As Frank said, you may have tearout issues if the grain is going in different directions (altho poplar's not too prone to that), but since you're taking so little off, you can take several very thin passes to minimize the risk of tearout.

John

If he did he's doing better than you are since you neglected to mention it.

Ok, nit lovers, let me put it this way.

All you need to glue pieces of wood together are complementary edges.

Mental midgets can pick at that one all they want.