Planing and Sanding thin wood. How?

[dirk martin]

I need to create a lot of thin boards. 1/4" and 1/8" thin.
The tools I have is the Grizzly G9983 15" wide belt sander, and an 18" Woodmaster with helical head.

My plan is to plan the wood normally, thru the woodmaster, down to about 3/8", and then us a Melamine support board to run it thru the Woodmaster again, until it's a tad over my final thickness.

Then, I'll use another support board to run the pieces thru my sander.

Does this sound like it'll work? Should I tape sand paper to those support boards before I lay my thin stock on them? Or use dbl sided carpet tape?

What do you guys think?

[Tom Esh]

Perhaps it's less an issue with a helical head, but I'd still secure the leading edge with some double-sided tape or a few dabs of hot glue to prevent the cutters from lifting the workpiece. (I can verify that when that happens the planner quickly morphs into a very effective chipper.) As long as the front end is well stuck the sandpaper shouldn't be needed.

[Tim Lawson]

My technique to planing thin wood is too add a platen to the planer. The platen I use is a piece of 3/4 MDF the width of the planer table with a stop underneath like a bench hook. I wax the surface of the MDF (bowling alley wax).

Works like a charm. Big advantage is that you can keep the boards moving through without having attach them to the support board.

Don't try to take off too much stock. I can get ash boards down to 2.2mm pretty consistently.

If you do decide to stick your pieces to a support board I recommend that you search out Intertape's double side tape with a paper backing - it's their golf club handle tape. Tears in the fingers and comes off the wood easily.

Tim

[Philip Rodriquez]

+1 for Tim

[John Coloccia]

On my Jet drum sander, I have a piece of MDF with sandpaper on it that I use as a sled for my thinner stock. After I stuck the sandpaper down, I flipped it over and ran it through to flatten the backside (being very careful to get the orientation correct, i.e. flip it over back to front, not left to right, and mark it). If I have to tweak anything on the sander, I just reflatten the back side of the sled, so any small misalignment won't affect the thin stock, which is where I care about it most. I glued my sandpaper down with spray adhesive. I don't anticipate ever having to replace it since it sees practically no wear.

[Prashun Patel]

How wide are your boards?

[Kyle Iwamoto]

What are you planing? If you're doing highly figured woods, I can attest that a planer will make a very good chipper. It makes as much noise as a commercial chipper too. I routinely use my Performax drum sander go to less than 1/8" on figured woods. No sled. I did build a sled, but found that i didn't really need to use it, unless I'm sanding very short pieces.

[John Coloccia]

The reason I use a sled for sanding is that the dust collection will suck the conveyor into the drum on thin pieces...using my Clearvue DC it does at least