Veneer Process Question

[Michael Merrill]

I've never tried my hand at resawing thin veneer for a table top and I have a table I'm working on that I thought might be a good candidate to learn.

Obviously, the first hurdle is to resaw the material sucessfully, I have a new Jet 14" saw that should make this much easier and possible. The material is maple and don't know if this is good/bad for veneering but at least it's not too expensive to learn on.

The real question is once making some resaw cuts and getting think pieces, I was thinking of 1/4 to start instead of thinner. How do I do about leveling/finishing the rough cut side when I have no drum sander? Is using the planer a possible solution? Am I headed down a path of certain failure?

All thoughts and advice are appreciated.

[Tom Jones III]

A planer is possible. 1/4" is pretty thick, I'm sure you could safely try for 1/8" thick on your first try.

To smooth it down I prefer a card scraper.

[Michael Merrill]

I guess starting at 1/4" think is a bit too much like you said, not really veneering at all that way! I should try a bit thinner.

I figured I could use a hand scrapper but I worry about getting the surface a consistant thickness especially when I'm going to edge glue a few pieces to get the needed width. Maybe that slight imperfections could be removed upon final sanding but figured they should be much closer to exact when edge glueing.

I think for the planer I've seen some ideas of adding a panel to the bottom of the planer to account for the lowest possible level allowed by many planers.

[Tom Jones III]

With a sled on your planer you shouldn't have a problem smoothing an 1/8" thick board. Make sure you have sharp knives and take off a tiny amount at a time. Whenever I power-plane thin material I always make about 1/3 too much because I know some of it will be ruined, but with 1/8" thick it should be pretty safe.

[Jamie Buxton]

3/32 is often cited as the upper limit for bandsawn veneer applied to a substrate like plywood or MDF. The idea is that the veneer should be thin enough that its dimensional changes with ambient humidity are completely controlled by the substrate. Thicker "veneer" may crack, or bow the composite panel.

I glue bandsawn veneer without doing much to the bandsawn face. Okay, if there's a big ridge someplace, I'll knock it down with a few strokes of a handplane. But other than that, I just put glue on the substrate, clamp the veneer down, and call it good. If you magnify the bandsawn face, you'll see lots of parallel valleys -- the scratches from the blade. You'll also see a lot of ridges between the valleys. When you clamp the veneer to the substrate, there's a nice tight zero-clearance contact between the substrate and the ridges. Over the face of the veneer, that's lots of glue area, even if you want to count the valleys as zero.

[Peter Dougenik]

personally I resaw to 3/32 and then drum sand to 1/16 (or thereabouts), but if you don't have a drum sander you have a few options. you can build a planer sled, as has been mentioned, to take things down to smooth and final thickness; but be prepared for the planer to eat a few of your veneers doing it this way especially with figured woods. I think the best way to go is joint one face and one edge, slice off your veneer sheet, another quick pass over the jointer for the bandsawn face of the source board will give you another clean flat face, slice another sheet, repeat. that way you will always have one clean face on each piece of veneer for a good bond to your substrate. once everything is glued up it won't be that hard to use a card scraper/scraper plane/sandpaper to smooth things to finish quality.

[Jamie Buxton]

The joint, resaw, joint, resaw, etc, technique works if you're slip matching, but doesn't allow for book matching. Me, I like book matching, so I'm kinda already committed to having to glue the bandsawn face.

[Michael Merrill]

This first project I need to cover about 20" and figured it would take 4 pieces to complete. One thought was to resaw a piece then very lightly plane the sawed remaining surface then repeat, this way I can glue the resaw surface and the lightly finished surface would be my finished side and not need as much hand scraping, etc.

Just some ideas, but then again I'm new to this process and might be way off base.