For the last two days I’ve been milling the stock for the crib.
Yesterday, I loaded all the wood into the Explorer and took it over to Bill’s house. He was kind enough to let me use his jointer. I had never used one before. So, I was given a tutorial on it’s use. How to hold the board, where to press(only on the out-feed table), where not to press (not on the in-feed table), and how to read the grain and what way the grain should run. So, I grabbed one of the pieces that goes into a leg and promptly ruined it. Not encouraging. I tapered it quite badly. I could get it to take off wood when I would first start it into the jointer, but could never get it to take off the back end. Figuring it was my technique, I moved to smaller pieces. I figured they’d be easier to control. Turns out they were. I got off to a slow start. But, the more I did it, the better I got at it. Somewhere along the line, I figured out what I did wrong on my first piece. Turns out, when a board is bowed, you want to joint it with the board facing the jointer so the two ends touch the table, not the high center. It works SO much better that way. My theory on that is that if it’s sitting like a bowl, and I only press on the out-feed table side, when the longer board is away from the cutter, I couldn’t apply enough pressure to keep it down. Thus, I was taking off wood on the start, but not on the end. I never did test that theory, but once I started using the straight edge to check the boards before jointing, I never had that problem again. Things people don’t tell you!
That was a long day and my hands took the brunt of it. Actually my left hand did. A multitude of tiny cuts, several splinters, and two scraped up knuckles. I saw and article or ad a while back about some self adhesive flexible tape to put on your fingers. I didn’t really understand at the time why you would one anything like that. But when you can’t wear gloves, it would have been really nice to have some of that to protect my fingers!
Today, I got my planer put back together. I went Sears, Lowes and Home Depot in the attempt to find a blade alignment tool and struck out in all three. Well, technically, I didn’t strike out at Sears. They could have ordered me one from their web site, but it costs more to ship it then the part itself costs. No thank you. So, I got inventive instead. I took my try square, the ruler out of my combo square and a couple spring clamps and made my own alignment tool. I made a mark on the inside of the planer so I always put the cutter head in the same position, then hooked a spring clamp to my try square so it would stand up on it’s own. Then, with the other spring clamp, I clamped the ruler to the square. Then I raised the blade till it just touched the ruler. Then I slid the contraption over to the other side and did the same thing. I repeated this process two more times (it’s a three blade planer), and I was done. Then I took a scrap piece of pine and ran it through. Then I raised the bed, flipped the piece of wood over and ran it through again, on the left side of the planer. With my highly accurate tape measure, it seemed like I had two faces that where parallel. Them, without moving the bed, I ran it through again on the other right of the planer (it’s 12.5″ wide). It took off a very small amount of shavings. Then I raised the bed again and ran the piece through on the right side. Then again, on the left side without moving the bed. It appeared that I got the same very small amount of shavings. So, I think I’m good! I was off to the basement to get my crib wood! (Oh, yeah, I ran what I did past Bill to see what he thought of my alignment and testing techniques. He approved.)
Now, some of you are going to cringe at this, I’m sure, but I had to mill 50 some odd pieces down from ~3/4″ down to 3/8″. That takes a long time. It’s a lot of passes, and it makes a lot of shavings. If I had some other tools, like a band saw, I could have resawn some of those pieces to produce two pieces and not wasted so much wood as shavings. But for now, I have to work with what I have.
This is what those shavings look like at the end of the day. And I still have two more passes to go on those pieces. But tomorrow is President’s Day, and it’s a holiday for me (that’s a first I think), so I plan on finish planing the rest of my lumber, and maybe get to gluing up a leg or two! You’ve got to love progress!
Stay sharp!
