Planing quilted maple

[Glen Dickey]

I have some quilted maple cut up ready for planing. I need to joint a face flat then run it through my planer. I just put a new set of knives in it and it planes well. I can set the feed to a crawl, and wet the faces before I start. Any other suggestion? I really dont want to mess this wood up.

Thanks,
Glen

[David Keller NC]

Glen - wetting the face of the wood may greatly assist you, but there's some boards of curly/quilted maple that will simply refuse to plane cleanly with a power planer, period.

There are several other options:

1: You can steepen the cutting angle of your planer knives, and move them well beyond how sharp they are from the factory. However, this does take a fair amount of skill with a honing stone, and making a simply holding jig for your workbench.

2: You can plane in very shallow increments to limit the depth and amount of tear-out, and do a lot of sanding to get rid of the rest. This approach has the disadvantage of potentially creating a less-than-flat surface when you're done from a random orbit sander.

3: You can do #2, and finish the work by hand with a cabinet scraper. This approach has the advantage of being faster and in some cases leaving behind a flatter surface.

4: You perform #2, then choose a film-building finish that you then sand back, such as alkyd varnish. Minor tear-out will be invisible under the film.

5: You can do the heavy work with the planer, and finish the job with a high-angle smoothing plane. However, if you've not had experience hand-planing (and don't have a hand-plane), this approach has a steep learning curve.

6: You can plane it with a carbide-insert, high-angle power planing head. This is an expensive option if you're just doing it once.

None of these options are without downsides. Personally, if I highly valued the wood, I'd use a combination of #1, #2, and #3 (or hand-plane it).

[Rick Peek]

If you know someone with a spiral head on their planer,have them
do it. I ran 25 bf thru mine with zero tear out. Wetting the wood
helps alot,but with my old planer (knives), I still got some tear out.

[David Helm]

If you have access to a wide drum sander you can do a good job without tearout. The process is slow but you don't need to take off as much wood.

[Van Huskey]

All good info thus far, one more to add is run the boards through at as much of a skew angle as possible, the wider the planer and the more narrow and shorter the boards the more skew you can get. Note you want the skew to cover the entire board, starting it at too much of an angle will cause it to straighten against the sides before the board is completely through.

[Jeff Monson]

If you have access to a wide drum sander you can do a good job without tearout. The process is slow but you don't need to take off as much wood.


I'll second David's advice, I have my best luck with a drum sander.
Thicknessing figured wood can be very difficult, seems when you do get tearout it goes deeper than normal.

[Glen Dickey]

Well I slowed the feed down to a crawl, wet the wood, and took real light cuts. Still had some tearout, but sanding cleaned it up ok.

Thanks for the advice,

Glen