Hey all! I have some big old pieces of timber I’m trying to refurbish.
The wood is really solid but they’re all a bit warped/bowed, v heavy, length roughly 1800mm to 2500mm (will cut down). Gave a shot at planing one yesterday and am finding it difficult to get a square plane, I think because it’s so long and heavy. I think the rollers were interfering when I rolled it over the top, like maybe a warped section hit them/changed the angle of the wood running along the blade. They’re too high for the bottom plane
Any ideas of the best way to approach? I think maybe I need to build a sled for them, something like long piece of ply with some framing to create a reasonably flat base, put wood bowed side up and attach to sled/support with expanding foam or wedges, run through bottom planer, turn over.
But at that point maybe it’s easier to just use an electric planer, square as much as possible by hand, work out how to set rollers properly and then run through planer…
The first pic plane looks pretty good, but I ran it through a bunch of times and it went way off. I can get some more of this timer so got a practice piece now haha
The first photo looked like it was planing evenly for the first couple of passes, but as I ran the piece through more and it was planing one side far more than the other. Eg on the thickness, one side is 75mm the other 65, and looking down the length it’s uneven, and not square.
But I can get another piece of timber to replace this one and use this as a practice piece to hopefully get it right. Going to give a shot with an electric hand planer today and I’ll let you know how it goes! Could definitely use a hand, I was thinking of coming Wednesday eve after this but also whenever.
Your idea of the sled might be a good option (it’s commonly done for very thin timber) but you would have to use something solid under your timber (in the high spots) to avoid the board flexing when it is run through the thicknesser. There are ways to remove twisting in timber on a jointer (planer) but as your board is quite large you might need an extra set of hands. Depending on the finished size that you require, one other option might be to re-mill the board using the bandsaw. If you do need an extra set of hands please feel free to contact me and I can help out.
