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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
innovate, v.:
To annoy people.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday November 14 2020, @03:14PM (13 children)
Laminate the 4 faces of 2x4s together until you get the depth you want. Makes for one hell of a bench top.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday November 14 2020, @09:19PM (12 children)
Done it (and stopped at that point). Need to put in some provisional legs and plane the surface.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday November 14 2020, @11:12PM (6 children)
I know a feller what's put hundreds of hours into getting him some hand plane learning over the past three years. Dude can turn a dollar store plane into something that'll shave translucent curls of wood off of oak or purple heart with nothing but some diamond stones, Windex, and patience. I generally find a belt sander good enough but then I don't make many things in such a way that they have to be absolutely flat and perfectly square. I'm lazy and just make most things to where they'll look and function correctly even if they're an eighth of an inch off on half the measurements. There are exceptions but usually I find them more tedious than fulfilling.
The most recent exception is I'm making 1/16" hickory veneers for laminating together into the plywood of a skateboard. Skateboards are generally 7-ply slow growth Canadian maple. That was all fine and good when I was 130lbs and couldn't buy my own cigarettes but it's less so nowadays. Hickory's heavier than maple but it also takes a lot more to break by applying force perpendicular to the grain. Bamboo is as well and it's lighter than either of them but it flexes way more than maple and way way more than hickory. Plus I despise the double kick, narrow, concave boards they make nowadays. I'm an 80s skater and I like my boards 10-11 inches wide up by the front truck, at least a nine inch wide tail, very little nose, almost zero concavity, and only the single kick on the tail. Extra weight from hickory I can deal with easily since force = mass x acceleration and my mass has increased just a bit since I was a teenager.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday November 15 2020, @12:02AM (3 children)
Sandpaper on a sheet of glass does it for me - too lazy to bring back the stones to flatness. Have done it only once for a plane irons but heaps of time for the chisels.
I bought a wooden block plane from the chinese, I stored it somewhere after sharpening the iron, fine tuning and trying it; beat me if I remember where I put it (I seriously need to unclutter my garage)
In any case, construction lumber is construction lumber, until I get to use the block/joiners planes, I'll need something to rough trim it (larger mouth/throat) if I want to get it done in this life. I'll probs go with an electric plane, even if my experience tells me it's quite easy to draw sharp grooves with the sides of it - flat blades, not chamfer, takes only a bit of leaning to the side and you have some more work to get rid of a groove you made with the time efficiency of a power tool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 15 2020, @12:36AM (2 children)
Could always belt sand it nearly flat then finish the surface with the plane. I mean, it's pine or spruce or such, so it should go pretty quickly unless you built one thirty meters long. Hand tools are outstanding at what they do when they're more efficient, more precise, or more effective than power tools for that particular task, otherwise you're trading your time for RSI and smugness. Wish I could convince The Roomie of this. Watching him do woodworking with no power tools for aesthetic reasons is both painful and boring.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Sunday November 15 2020, @03:20PM (1 child)
I had teachers who would tear you a new one for planing after you sand. Any grit that got left behind would wreck the blade edge.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 15 2020, @06:29PM
Oh absolutely. But if it's your plane and you're the one having to sharpen it...
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 15 2020, @03:48AM (1 child)
Are you thinking of a composite laminate? Seems like a combo of alternating bamboo and hickory or maple might give a nice combination of strength, stiffness, and weight. Also, what are you thinking of gluing it together with? Apparently, normal wood glue is too rigid for something that flexes a lot - so YouTube tells me.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 15 2020, @01:40PM
What I'd really like to do is a composite bamboo/bois d'arc deck but lumber prices have gone insane over the past six months and I have a shitload of hickory already on hand from hardwood flooring that was on the stage we ripped up at the church. So I'm spending time ripping 1/16"x1"x12" strips and laminating them together instead of spending money. Two or three hours of saw time gets you enough for one 1'x3' veneer, I want at least nine.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 16 2020, @05:09AM (4 children)
> and plane the surface.
Why use a plane to flatten the surface, that's the hard way.
If you don't have access to a really wide jointer (which makes a plane surface), then there is a trick I learned from an ace pattern maker* -- once you have the benchtop all glued up, tack on dead straight 1x4 or similar on the two long sides with the top edge an inch or so higher than the bench top. The 1x4 should be a little longer than the length of the bench. Move the 1x4 up and down as necessary so that the 2 top edges are in the same plane and roughly parallel to the bench top, I leave it as an exercise to the reader to work out this detail (there are several methods). When this step is complete you have established the tops of the 1x4s in a true plane surface.
Step two is to take an ordinary router and mount it on a very long & stiff base, 2x+ as long as the width of your bench**. I happen to have a piece of 3"x3" aluminum angle extrusion for this, but anything stiff that you can bolt the router onto is fine. By now you should see where this is going--lay the long base across the 1x4s and set the router depth a little deeper than the lowest point in the glue-up. Route (it's analogous to end milling) the top flat. The surface won't be great, but it will be dead flat (in one plane) and you can smooth with a sanding block, or if you prefer the clean look of a cut surface (without any grit in the surface), then take really thin cuts with a hand plane.
A neat thing about this technique is that it works on end grain too -- I tacked router supports to the side of a big tree stump and routed (milled?) off the top perfectly flat. All set to take a table top without any rocking back and forth.
* Al worked at a boat company and later Bell Aircraft after WWII. Among many other things, he built the full scale mockup of the Bell X-1 supersonic plane from wood. Back then it was common to build a full size wood version of the plane to lay out all the wiring, plumbing, etc...since they didn't have 3D CAD to check for interference between parts.
** It can be shorter, then you mount the router off-center and have to turn the router base around to do the other half of the top. I prefer to do it all in one setup with the longer router support.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday November 16 2020, @06:18AM (3 children)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmUloHQjvOw [youtube.com]
Because I need to get used with a plane anyway.
Otherwise, why using hand tools when you can build/buy a CNC?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 16 2020, @04:41PM (2 children)
That would be one big CNC router to mill a workbench flat on top! The low cost ones (for wood working--like cutting out kitchen counter tops) never looked that stiff to me. I'd ask carefully to see how flat (planar) they can hold on a large single surface. My 3" aluminum angle is stiffer than the bridge on most of the lower cost CNC routers that I've seen.
I've done the hand work to resurface a maple butcher-block workbench (3x6 feet) and it took a long time. If I'd been able to "machine" it planar using this router approach (which I learned later), then I would have been able to focus on the hand cabinet-scraper work that generated a lovely surface.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday November 16 2020, @09:32PM (1 child)
If I were to have a CNC that big, I'd barely need a workbench. A flat surface for sanding/assembly the pieces would mostly suffice in most of the cases.
In any case, the "planing by router" is equivalent to building a CNC table/gantry then move the router by hand - the flatness of the surface will be as good as the stiffness of frame/bridge you build in this one-off fashion; if those two are stiff enough, you can use the same for a full DIY CNC build.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 17 2020, @02:29AM
Earlier I hadn't looked at the video you linked, which I just did. Thanks! It looks like the router sled has caught up with my old toolmaker, who built his supports directly onto the work. That's what I did for the tree stump, which wasn't going to be moved! As you say, the router box & sled are the core of a CNC 2D router setup. Since I moved the router (with a smaller bit) freehand on my long bridge, I didn't get nice straight cuts, in fact I "mowed in spirals" on the high spots first. Hardly matters since there is going to be a secondary smoothing process.
In your link, and also another one, both of those guys relied on another flat surface, rather than checking that their guide surfaces were in one plane: first guy relied on his floor being flat (not always a great assumption) and the second one relied on having a flat work table (but it didn't look very stiff). Since they were making decorative tables (and not a work bench), that was probably flat enough.