Planing Challenge

[Sean Nagle]

I'm looking for tips on hand planing a large tabletop for a trestle table? I have milled and glued up a 42" x 72" cherry tabletop. It is currently about 1" thick. The top is really pretty flat but I need to even up some very slight offsets at the glue joints. I then need to smooth the whole top in preparation for finishing. Planing the outside foot or so is not a problem when it sits on my workbench. How do you plane toward the center of such a large surface from end-to-end? Leverage and control of the plane becomes very difficult when planing the center. Is it better to put something like this on the floor?

[Terry Beadle]

I would treat it as if it were a board. Any rough finished board that needed truing. I would use my #7 as the primary plane to do most of the work. I would put a slight bevel on the far side to prevent blow out and then plane cross grain with the #7 until I got it close to flat. Then I'd switch to planing with the grain until it was pretty flat and do the final spots with a #3 or #4 smoother. A table top doesn't need to be as dead flat as your work bench top in my opinion. It should be reasonable flat so that cups, plates, and glasses can sit with out tilting etc. But you don't need to flatten it and check it for less than a 2 thou thickness in any dips with a Starrate straight edge.

Since it's 42 inches wide, you could work from each edge towards the center and flip the board around to do the other side, in which case you wouldn't need to bevel an edge against blow out.

Buy a good sized bottle of elbow grease and take your best shot ! :D

Enjoy the shavings !

[Jim Koepke]

This is where the elbow grease comes in handy.

What Terry said is correct.

Also either small planes or scrapers will come in handy. Sometimes the glue lines are in a valley due to the clamping when they were glued. A large plane will just straddle the valley and not get to the area unless a lot of wood is removed on either side.

jim

[David Weaver]

Also either small planes or scrapers will come in handy. Sometimes the glue lines are in a valley due to the clamping when they were glued. A large plane will just straddle the valley and not get to the area unless a lot of wood is removed on either side.

jim

Ditto that. It'll be a long day if you want to effectively face joint the whole thing and have it smoothed at the same time.
This is a good task for a short length true smooth plane or a stanley 80.

[Mark Kosmowski]

I would treat it as if it were a board. Any rough finished board that needed truing. I would use my #7 as the primary plane to do most of the work. I would put a slight bevel on the far side to prevent blow out and then plane cross grain with the #7 until I got it close to flat.

...

If one was available, would a 62 be better for the cross-grain work?

[Prashun Patel]

The glossier your finish you intend to put on it, the more the critical the flatness becomes.

[Daniel Kennedy]

I recently went through what you are talking about. I flattened a very large surface by hand. I put a link to my original post that has some pictures of the process. At any rate, my table was wide enough where when I planed across grain toward the center, I would stop taking a shaving just after I crossed the center line. After going across the grain with a jack plane, I then went with the grain with a jointer, and then finished with a smoother. The center is a challenge to get to when going with the grain. I personally used shorter strokes that started and ended off of the wood surface if that makes any sense. I also wasn't worried about taking my shavings in a perfectly straight line. I focused on making sure the surface that remained was smooth. I hope that helps.


http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=127919
(http://http//www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=127919)

[george wilson]

Someone suggested dragging his plane down a flat concrete (sidewalk?) to flatten the sole. He really did!!!

You might give a nano second to thinking of doing that to your table. :) that is,IF you can find a truly flat area of concrete to begin with.

[Mark Roderick]

I've done this successfully using a low-angle jack plane with a toothed plane to remove most of the stock and then a jointer plane to smooth it all down. I checked for overall flatness using two strings running diagonally corner-to-corner, then check for "local" flatness periodically using the edge of one of those big squares used to measure and cut drywall.

A big tabletop does not have to be perfectly flat. Visitors are amazed when I tell them I flattened the top with hand planes, but it wasn't hard at all. In fact, it was really fun, taking those long shavings with a sharp plane.

[Sean Nagle]

Thanks for all the input.

The boards comprising my tabletop have been run through a planer and the overall top is actually very flat, so I don't think I need to take a great deal of material off to flatten any part of it. What I need to plane away is some chip-out from scraping glue and some slight dents from clamps as well as cleaning up glue spots caused by clamping cauls. I really think 3-4 light passes with a smoothing plane will do it.

I was mostly curious about how to get leverage on a plane when taking a pass 20" from the edge of the tabletop for a full 72" length :)

Daniel, your post was great to see. That's a fabulous table you built. I love those wide boards. When you mention taking shorter strokes in the middle of the tabletop surface, do you mean something like an airplane doing "touch-and-go's"? How long were those strokes?

[Daniel Kennedy]

Sean,
Yes, touch and go's is a perfect description. I used that technique where it was hard to reach. I didn't really have any target length for each individual pass; it really varied depending on what I could get to. As I think back there were a couple other things I did to make it easier. Every so often I would draw with a pencil across the whole top to make sure I was hitting everything with the smoother. After I was comfortable that I was hitting everything, that is when I set for a very thin shaving and tried to take full length shavings for the final pass. When you are taking your thinnest shavings it will take less force to push the plane, so you will be able to take those full length final passes down the center of the table.

[Kieran Kammerer]

http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=127919


Anybody else having a problem getting this link to work?

Thanks,

Kieran

[Kieran Kammerer]

works now!

[Sean Nagle]

So I'm probably going to be banished from "Neanderthal Haven" for this... today I found a local cabinet shop with a 54" Timesaver. In 10 minutes the top was sanded to 150 grit including a belt change :o