Thickness plane veneer

[lowell holmes]

I started to bring back a 2010 string about thickness planing thin boards, but - - -

There is a workshop tip in the December 2016 (current of issue of Fine Woodworking) that describes a sled for thickness planing to 1/16" thickness in a lunchbox thickness planer.

I thought you might like to know. It involves a sled, and it looks remarkably safe to me.


Check it out!

[Jim Becker]

That might work well for a thicknesser that uses rubber rollers, but about the best I can do with "larger iron" is 1/8" and I really don't like going that thin. The larger thicknessing machines tend to have serrated metal rollers to push the material though and they can leave embossed marks when taking extremely fine cuts as necessary to do "veneer" without ripping it apart with the knives.

I'll try to check out that article if I can get ahold of a copy of the issue...I no longer subscribe to anything.

[Bradley Gray]

I have tried planing thin stock with a sled with a Parks 12" planer with back beveled knives. It is disappointing to blow up wood I have invested time in resawing so I have gone to using a thickness sander- even though it is slower- as all the pieces survive.

[Frederick Skelly]

I saw that too Lowell. It was interesting enough that I may try it.
Fred

[Matt Day]

I have tried planing thin stock with a sled with a Parks 12" planer with back beveled knives. It is disappointing to blow up wood I have invested time in resawing so I have gone to using a thickness sander- even though it is slower- as all the pieces survive.

Agreed. And when thin pieces explode it gets your heart rate going!

[Erik Loza]

My experience has been the same as Bradley and Matt's. Piece of curly maple some gentleman brought up to me at a trade show. Wanted to see how the Tersa head would handle figured wood. Blew to pieces the moment it hit the cutterhead. A sled would be the way to do it but there are no guarantees. I'd focus on Plan-B. Good luck,

Erik

[Joe Spear]

I also have had terrible experiences planing wood to less than 1/8 inch. With a Byrd head or knives, it has just blown apart.

[Michael Weber]

I'll try to check out that article if I can get ahold of a copy of the issue...I no longer subscribe to anything.
Me too, just too........ Oh wait, you're talking about magazines.

[Prashun Patel]

Me too, bad luck with thin veneer planing. Better luck had when gluing it to its substrate first then planing, if you have the capacity in width and it's going on something flat.

[Chris Padilla]

I have tried planing thin stock with a sled with a Parks 12" planer with back beveled knives. It is disappointing to blow up wood I have invested time in resawing so I have gone to using a thickness sander- even though it is slower- as all the pieces survive.

Yep...right here: drum sander of some kind is the way to go with thin stuff. I did a tansu (http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?92396-Tansu) this way shop-cutting walnut veneers and drum sanding them down to 1/16". It was mind-numbingly boring and long work drum sanding but the results were absolutely fantastic!

[Mike Henderson]

I'll throw my hat in the ring. I've had bad luck trying to plane thin stock. I use a drum sander now to work thin panels or veneer.

Mike

[John Lankers]

Same experience here, my planer would just shred it and put it straight in the dust bin with a loud bang.

[Jim Becker]

me too, just too........ Oh wait, you're talking about magazines.
roflol!!!!!!!

[Jamie Buxton]

So the collective experience here is that you can't plane thin lumber with a standard planer. Yet the OP is talking about an article which promises just that. It seems that very few Creekers still subscribe to Fine Woodworking. Would anybody care to summarize that article, especially why the author can apparently do the impossible?

[Mike Henderson]

So the collective experience here is that you can't plane thin lumber with a standard planer. Yet the OP is talking about an article which promises just that. It seems that very few Creekers still subscribe to Fine Woodworking. Would anybody care to summarize that article, especially why the author can apparently do the impossible?
His sled has a dado cut into it across the sled. He glues a piece of wood that will fit into the dado to his "veneer" and then puts the piece of wood into the dado with the veneer trailing. I suppose what this does is keep the leading edge of the veneer down when it encounters the knives.

I only did a quick read of the article so someone who read it closer might give a slightly different analysis.

I have no idea if it would work - you'd have to build the sled to find out. My posting earlier is my experience without such a sled.

Mike

[Based on my experience with planing thin material, it seems that the initial encounter of the wood with the blades is where the material gets shredded. If so, his sled would help.]

[Glenn de Souza]

So the collective experience here is that you can't plane thin lumber with a standard planer. Yet the OP is talking about an article which promises just that. It seems that very few Creekers still subscribe to Fine Woodworking. Would anybody care to summarize that article, especially why the author can apparently do the impossible?

He's not doing the impossible. I, and several furniture maker friends have done this routinely, at least to 3/32". I can't recall many instances of going all the way to 1/16" because frankly I was taught that the sawn veneer is stable for wood movement up to 1/8" so our target was always 3/32"-1/8". We did this procedure for bent laminations also (which might be one case where going down to 1/16" could be advantageous).

The keys are technique, using a planer with rubber wheel rollers, not the serrated metal kind, using a planer board for support, and most importantly, paying close attention to grain direction.

I saw the article, and the author demonstrates a novel way of securing the veneer with the strip of wood in the dado, and I also thought his method of fixing a leader piece of veneer to the board is clever because it allows the rollers to be fully engaged before the keeper veneer hits them. This is more troublesome, but also more sophisticated than the way I learned.

The way we were taught was to stand on the infeed side of the planer, and hold the veneer up high and feed it into the planer at an angle of around 30 degrees so you are effectively forcing the leading edge down. Imagine it as though the planer is at the bottom of a ski slope and your veneer is feeding down the slope and into the planer at the base. This was to force the leading edge tight to the planer bed and counteract it lifting up into the cutters. Again, so long as grain direction is favorable, the knives usually won't catch and shatter the veneer. Some veneers and wood species might have uncooperative grain which presents its own problem. If the veneer shatters, it is usually for one of two reasons or both - the veneer lifts into the knives at the point it is entering, and/or the knives grab the veneer by catching up on uncooperative grain. Sharp planer knives is important also.

This is one instance where a lunchbox style planer is actually preferable to a more industrial type.