New Planer Sled Design ("Multiwedge")

Hi there. I'm not a frequent poster here, but because there always seems to be a lot of chatter about jointers, planers, and combinations thereof, I thought I would share a new planer sled design (for flattening boards) that I came up with. It's meant to be convenient, easy, and quick to use. (Though most people don't design stuff that's meant to be annoying, right?)

In any case, I made a video about it here: https://youtu.be/6aB21q58MkU

I have a small, mostly useless write-up on my dumb blog, but the video seemed to be the best way to show what it's supposed to do.

Thank you Brian, great presentation.

Bruce

fantastic video

Very cool design Brian. Thanks for sharing! I needed this last weekend (isn't that always the case?)

I like your design. It addresses most of the problems of other sleds: much lower weight by having reference flat surface separate, fixing board in place with wedges held with wedges rather than screws (as in the Rust design) keeps metal away from cutters. Sandpaper bits anchor the wedges well, but on the other side you could consider a bevel, making the dados into sliding dovetails (just on one side - wedges should meet wedges square). That might lock everything down even better.

Clamping to your workbench offsets the tendency to arch upwards caused by pushing in wedges on top. But you might think about making a continuous narrow strip in the top layer down the middle the length of the sled. That could help to resist the arching, and possibly make it harder to bump the wedges out of place as you manipulate the sled.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Alan Schwabacher

but on the other side you could consider a bevel, [...]. That might lock everything down even better.

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Suggestions like your neat idea here come up from time to time, especially when it comes to concern about the sled flexing and the wedges loosening up. I considered a lot of possibilities for fixing the wedges in place. In practice, though, I haven't found a need for anything stronger, presumably because the wedges don't need to be held in place for very long, and the wedging direction makes them resistant to backout forces from the feed rollers. When I was developing the sled, I just always seemed to come back to the straight slot design because it's so easy to build and always worked fine.

Beautifully tuned hand plane too!