Thicknessing Tiger Maple without a widebelt sander?

[Jim Underwood]

If you don't have a wide belt sander, how do you thickness highly figured wood like Tiger Maple?

And no, I don't want it "rustic"! :)

[Herr Dalbergia]

I use my Frommia planer / thickness planing machine. Carefully, light turns, and watch the direction, normally there is one direction where it works quite ok, sharp knives...but the final surface I would do with a sanding machine...

[Jerry Wright]

I use my DW735 planer with light passes and am able to start sanding with 150-180 grit orbital sander. Birdseye maple is tougher.

[john bateman]

Also, wetting the wood helps. Just brush on some water the last couple passes through the planer.

[Carl Beckett]

Funny, I was just helping out a fellow creeker this afternoon surface his workbench top of hard maple with some figure in it (beautiful wood!). Sharp jointer... some tearout. Sharp planer... some tearout. Sander (we tried three... a widebelt, a small widebelt, and a drum.. .but thats another story).

Have made several projects from hard maple and I have never found a way to prevent tearout with knives. Wetting the wood helps only a little. A good sharp handplane with the throat closed down is pretty good, up until the grain twists on you and a chunk comes out.

The other option is scraping (which isnt thicknessing). I have also worked a top flat once with a belt sander. Uggh!

Find someone with a sander is my advice.

[Jim Underwood]

If I can't borrow the one at work, I suppose I'll have to make an attachment for my mini-lathe. I probably need to do that anyway...

[Gordon Eyre]

I just dimensioned some hard maple and the boards that were figured had tear out on both the planer and jointer. I then adjusted them for just a very light pass and both machines produced a good surface on the same boards that had tear out previously. It took me longer but the results were good.

[Eddie Darby]

Also, wetting the wood helps. Just brush on some water the last couple passes through the planer.
Nice tip!
Another trick is to put the boards through your machine on an angle, so you are cutting more with the flames.
If you have a planer with non-disposable knives, you can use back bevels of a few degrees to help reduce tear-out. The back bevels only need to be thicker than the wood shavings you plan to take.

[Mike Konobeck]

Segmented head. Find someone with one and you shouldn't have a problem. You can always rent some time at a local cabinet shop that has one or a nice belt sander. I have a 4 blade jointer/planer and even with brand new knives and perfectly tuned (to my standards) I always get some tearout. I keep wanting to get a segmented head and will when I make it a priority.

If you have no other choice then you have to pay attention to the feed direction that minimizes tearout and feed at angle as much as possible as mentioned. Light passes help too. If you can adjust the speed of the head and/or feed rate then experiment to get a combination that is optimal.

[Bob Coleman]

You know, until I joined here and read the many posts on this same topic, I had never given a second thought to running highly figured boards over the jointer and through the planer. Not once have I had a tearout problem.

[Mel Fulks]

Bob,what kind of planer and cutters are you using?

[lowell holmes]

I run it through an original lunch box planer (Delta).

I spray the board with a light mist of water and take light cuts. Somtimes I have to touch it up with a high angle iron in my BU jack plane.

[Brett Robson]

I'd use your planer to get it close, stopping about 1/8" or so thicker than what you need. Then use a hand plane with a toothed blade to bring it down to the final thickness. Next use a smoother to remove the bulk of the ridges left by the toothed blade, but don't plane down into the solid wood. Finish with a card scraper and a light sanding. Easy peasey.

[Alan Bienlein]

I would just run it thru my Ridgid TP1300 planer. Ever since I swaped out the straight knife cutter head to the hekical one I've never looked back and even stopped worrying about grain orientation.

[Jeff Monson]

I have best luck with my L/N #8 smoother. I have had little luck with straight knives on a planer.

[Dick Strauss]

A variable feed machine (like the Woodmaster) is the ticket. You slow the feed down and get many more cuts per inch. No wetting, no back bevels, no problem. I had no issues with extremely curly hard maple that had about 10 curls per inch.

I had large sections of tearout on a Delta 15" planer with freshly sharpened blades. We tried skewing the boards and wetting the boards but we didn't have any luck. Thankfully a neighbor had a WM712 that solved the problem.

[george wilson]

You can greatly eliminate tearout on curly wood by grinding a bevel on the front of the cutting edges of your planer knives. They will be scraping more than cutting,and it really works wonders. I ran some curly maple through a Northfield 24" planer that has carbide cutters that are nearly vertical on their knives' front edges. Totally amazing that not one tear out was made. This planer has an unusual knife configuration: The individual carbide cutters are about 1" wide each. They re grind the cutters in a way similar to the re grinding of conventional knives,using a grinding attachment that is fitted to the top of the planer. The cutting edges are much more blunt than the cutting angles of regular knives,requiring more power to plane the wood. It doesn't matter with the large motor the planer has. It just planes like a normal planer. I can't remember the H.P. of the motor the planer has.

If you have a 3 h.p. planer,and take lighter than usual cuts,it will still work just fine. A friend of mine had a business for a few years. His partner used to grind the front edge of their knives on a 20" disc sander. He WAS good with the sander!! It worked great.

[Keith Outten]

If you don't have a wide belt sander, how do you thickness highly figured wood like Tiger Maple?

And no, I don't want it "rustic"! :)

Jim,

You can use a CNC Router. There should be plenty of CNC owners in your neck of the woods that can help you out.
.

[glenn bradley]

This is what pushed me to a spiral head on my jointer. Worked so well I went spiral on the planer as well. My loss due to tear out on difficult/reversing grains has been near zip ever since.

[george wilson]

Yes,the spiral heads also scrape with their high cutting angles.

[Charles Brown]

Jim, PM sent.