Homemade toy

[Jim King]

As you can imagine we have a lot of conference table size lumber here in the Amazon but we had no way to clean them up as we dont have a planer more then 24" wide.

We welded up this beast and with 24 roller bearings and a homemade cutter head made from helical head planer chips on a normal router and we can now do a slab 5 foot wide and 13 feet long.

In the photo Wally is doing a small log slice for practice but we are ready to try a table top as soon as we find something worth while.

The stripes on the log sloces are an optical illusion as they just sand off easily. I assume it is from the 2 inch dia cutting head cutting in both directions and the fibers bend both ways.

[Bill Huber]

That looks like it should do the trick, kind of neat.

Now take the router out and get a lunch box planer motor and cutter and mount on the frame and do it 4 times as faster.
It may work, if you took a planer motor and and head which are the same unit and just mounted it on some type of frame like the router.

[Brett Baldwin]

There's a good bit of ingenuity. Are the legs of the stand your height adjustment? I'd be curious to know how much a slab that wide would move over the seasons. I assume you have some fairly stable wood you'd use for that size project.

[Jim Becker]

This is very similar to the Lucas commercial setup that a local mill uses for large slabs near me. Very nice job on this one, Jim!

[Jim King]

Bill , the little planers wont handle end grain so that is why we made it with a router.

Bret: We havent got a good design yet for the support base and we are using a simple wooden table and shimming the heigth level step by step with 1/4 inch boards. Not to high teck but it works.

Jim: We saw something similar on the internet and made this from memory. I am sure as we go forward we will wish we had studied harder before we lost the site.

[Mike Golka]

That is very similar to the home made CNC I built a couple years ago. Mine is only good for work 2' x 3' and up to 6" in height but it works well for planing down thick rough wood. If you true up the waste board first then you have a surface that is parallel to the cutter and after truing one side the piece is flipped over and the final thickness can be cut with pretty good percision.

Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.

[Wally Lloyd]

I made one of these little beasts out of wood a couple of years ago, it worked well. I just got round to welding this up, my welding is not very pretty but it holds!! Without the router this little beauty cost around $400-00, not bad as the one made in Australia costs around Nine Grand. The spacing system is a little crude, but the table is as perfect as you can get, less than a sixtyfourth off in all four corners.

[Jim Dunn]

One word, "innovative"! For a shop/homemade piece of equipment it's real neat.

[Jim Becker]

Jim, I think you made it just fine. The whole principle is pretty simple...many folks use a smaller and temporary version in their shops for surfacing slabs that are beyond the capability of their jointers/planers all the time. As long as your frame is "flat" relative to itself, your router will surface the material parallel to the frame's plane. If your support structure for the workpiece is set up to have it's basic surface also parallel to the frame's plane, you just need to shim the workpiece for the first side so it will not rock and then turn it over sans the shims to get a parallel face to the first one. Pretty basic. Yours is just big! (As it should be for the kind of opportunities you have to use it...)

[Wally Lloyd]

We have just had an offer from a friend to automate this machine!!! Turn her on and watch her go!!!!!!!