After ripping off the top part of my six foot walnut board (where it splits and has some nice crotch figure) – it needs some serious flattening. Back to the old #6 for starters. Unfortunately this can leave some serious tear-out in the switching grain.
I first use an old #6 to flatten this crotch walnut
So, I also sneaked in some passes with my Lie-Nielsen #62 with a toothed blade. Zero tear-out from that, and can still take a fairly large bite.
A toothed blade leaves a funny surface, but has zero tearout
Once one side is flat, I switched to my Lie-Nielsen #7 to smooth out tracks left by the previous planes.
Lie-Nielsen #7 is used to continue to flatten and remove previous mill marks
Finally, I flattened the other side with my Jet Drum Sander.
An open-ended Jet drum sander is used to flatten the other side
I also watched your video on flattening the 6 foot Walnut stretcher. I’m curious why you did not start out with a scrub plane first? Mine gets a lot of use when I have a fair amount of material to remove.
Steve — the biggest reason? I don’t have one 😉 A plane with an extremely cambered iron (maybe 6″ radius) is a great alternative and that’s what my #6 does. I can take really thick shavings with it (approaching 1/16″)
Unfortunately that blade can really take large chunks of tear-out along with it if you’re not careful about the grain. Going straight across is a great method and makes it really easy to push. Unfortunately in this case with crotch walnut, the grain is just going every which way and I got pretty large tear-out no matter what I did. That’s where the toothed blade really shines.
[…] to the usual suspects. Lie-Nielsen #7 does a lot of flattening work Posted by Morton at 1:00 pm Add […]