I will second Mark's experience, I was at Chris Hall's shop a few weeks ago. He took a board, told me he didn't even bother looking at grain direction and sent it through the surfacer. It produces a perfect finish, like a piece of glass, in 2 seconds. You could inspect the shaving it was free of defects which says the surface is free of defects. A shaving with holes will denote tearout or other defect in the surface.
I do the same with hand planes, but of course it takes longer than what a super surfacer can do. Both require an in-depth understanding of the chip breaker to accomplish the goal of a tear out free glassy surface.
Most of the boards I plane are very very easy to plane, two strokes and I have a finished board. Boards with interlock can be a slightly more tedious a process but I plane them as well. Where this kind of thing really comes in handy is when you're working on something wider than the widest wide belt. I took on a project last year that other shops in my area turned down because it was too wide for their equipment. I produced it in a reasonable amount of time and produced a high quality result that was perfectly flat across the 54" wide surface.
I also produce table tops that are much wider than my equipment, its easy to prep them carefully join together then hand plane for a final finish. Must better and faster than sanding to that size or hauling a 300lb slab out of my shop into someone else shop to flatten, then risk damaging it on the return to my shop.
For some table tops I will sand with a DA after hand planing for anything that is going to have a heavy modern finish on it (as opposed to a light varnish). This helps me avoid seeing the minor scallops from a planed surface appearing in the finished result, for some reason modern finishes show that.
Last edited by Brian Holcombe; 07-25-2019 at 1:15 PM.
Bumbling forward into the unknown.
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