Supersize Your Jointer for Planing Over-width Boards

master carpenter Matt Jackson inviting you to spend a few minutes with a master and by a few minutes I pretty much mean a few minutes with a busy work and life schedule these days it's tough to squeeze everything in I'm working on a sawhorse build video for these guys back here I've been working on that for a couple of months actually you haven't been able to get that thing cranked out but I wanted to throw a quick tip in here that shows how I'm able to supersize the capacity of my jointer everyone knows it's easy to flatten a board up to the width capacity of a jointer in a single pass it works just fine but the project I'm working on which is this floating vanity cabinet back here has drawer fronts and doors that are both more than eight inches in width but I still need to make them perfectly flat so that they work on the cabinet so my challenge is how to flatten the board that's wider than the capacity of my jointer so I call it super sizing the jointer it's a really simple process and it allows me to flatten the board with an 8 inch jointer up to the capacity of my thickness planer which is in this case 13 inches I've got to go 11 and a half inches for the doors but the drawer fronts are just a little over eight so that's what I'm gonna use for an example I'm just going to flatten some nine-inch boards with this process and it works for anything between the 8-inch capacity of the jointer up to the 13-inch capacity of the thickness planer so I'll show you how it works I'm not going to go too deep into the weeds about how to run a jointer but the basic process is taking a twisted or cupped board and just running it across the infeed table the cutter evens out the surface and it slides across the outfeed table once one surface of the board is flat that gets laid on the platen of the thickness planer where the cutters in the planer smooth off the top surface and make the two surfaces completely parallel that's all simple enough the challenge comes in when the board that needs to be flattened is wider than the cutter head on the jointer first off it hits the guard and it won't go through second off there'll be a flat surface eight inches wide and then there'll be a lug on the side from the part of the board that hangs over the table so in the width of the boards that I need the plane exceeds the capacity of the jointer these are the steps I take to supersize that capacity first off I remove the guard and I don't take that action lightly the cutter head is totally exposed and I need to pay attention to that on a short board like this or any board that is up to about the length of the infeed table I don't need to take off the rabbiting shelf I can use one pass to smooth the bottom of the board and not have to worry about that you know I want to keep this video short so I'm not going to go in-depth into how to adapt this process for a really wide board or one that's extra long with a lot of cup and twist in it but rather I'll just cover the steps for a pretty straightforward board like this the main difference in the process is that as long as I can do the whole flattening process on the board in one pass I can leave the rabbiting ledge on if it's going to take multiple passes to get the board flat and get the twist out of it I have to take the rabbiting ledge off because after the first pass the lug will hit this and it throws everything out if anybody has any questions about that ask it in the comments and I'll try to explain it a little further but as it is I'm just going to flatten the face of this board get it flat and smooth I'll put that squiggle reference mark on there so you can see the process in action and this is a pretty flat straight board I don't have a lot to do so I'm just going to take a minimal pass at just under a sixteenth of an inch if you can see here how the process is working this is flat and smooth this is the lug that's left over it hangs over the edge of the table this is the part that hasn't been planed yet and there's actually a little spot on this corner that a pass of this depth didn't clean up but that's okay because the majority of this surface is flat and without twist cup or bowl complete respect for that cutterhead when it's totally exposed is the only sensible thing all right now you can see that this whole surface is flat and clean there's squiggle lines remaining on the lug of this board I think you can see the step here this is the thickness of the pass I just took if I were to run this board through here again you can see that the lug hits this table twists the board and throws everything off so with the rabbit ledge on you only get one pass to make it right if you've got long really twisted or really bowed boards that are gonna take more than one pass take the rabbit ledge off and run the passes until you've got a clean smooth flat surface as a reference for the thickness planning process so this is where the tip comes in it should make sense by looking at this that if I were to run this through the thickness planer the lug would throw off the accuracy of this plain surface the board would go through twisted any bowl or cup that's in that lug wood right on the table and just transfer that bow or twist or cup to the other side of the board lower the twist not the cup so I need to reference this flat surface as it's going through the thickness planer so that this surface comes out coplanar to this and is not influenced by that lug of wood that's on there and you'll be able to tell in the final edit that this was an unscripted video the way that I am able to supersize the capacity of the jointer and flatten and thickness playing boards wider than its capacity is to use an auxilary planer platen this is just a piece of quarter-inch melamine MDF and as long as the lug on the piece that I've run across the jointer is less than a quarter of an inch I can slide this platen into the thickness planer and I hope we can see this in the camera but the log of wood just hangs over the edge of this platen and like I said as long as that lug is a quart is less than a quarter of an inch the piece slides through the jointer referencing off the flat face so that the thickness planer can plane this surface smooth and the pass on top is uninfluenced by the lug that hangs over on this side I'll add squiggle marks to the surface and you can see there's a step in the surface of that blue dot board which doesn't matter this is all extra thick and I've got the flat smooth straight surface on this side and the irregular rough surface on this side of the board I'll run it through the planer letting it glide across the surface of this MDF platen and you take note that I've got a log of oak screwed on the back of this platen and that just keeps this from sliding through the planer along with the wood being planed [Music] after the first pass you can see how some of the area is cleaned up where the board was thicker these rough surfaces in that step are still in there but another 30 second or 360 fourths of an inch will have this side perfectly flat and smooth that's about the sweetest could be right there I've got a piece here that's almost 9 inches wide that's all flat and smooth even though my joiner is only 8 inches I've done this where the width of the piece is a full 12 inches wide and using a full 8 inch pass on the backside and cantilevering that 4 inches with the platen and by taking light passes I can get this second surface to be just as flat and smooth as the first 8-inch surface and the next step is to plane off this lug I'll add squiggle marks to here paying a special attention to this corner or this rabbeted edge or the lug and the flat surface join but all's I do is flip the piece with the full flat side down and run this piece through the planer with the lug side up and here again as long as this lug is less than an eighth of an inch I can just use the same planer setting and run it through and the planer will be planing this thickness here if this lug sometimes if if it's 5/16 of an inch or something I have to raise the planer up accordingly and then take this lug down until the whole thing will go through in one pass I hope that kind of makes sense and you should be able to see that from that pass the lug is gone the rabbeted edge is gone there's a few squiggle marks out in here where there's a slight irregularity the pass I made on the jointer wasn't quite deep enough to get this roughness out of here but the bottom surface was flat without a twist and once I've milled all the pieces to this stage I can take the planer platen out and I have to lower the cutter had a quarter inch to get right back to this setting so I'll go a quarter inch plus 1/32 and clean up this side and I do that by turning the planer on lowering the cutter head till it just engages the wood I let it pull it through taking off a shaving and I give it just a little more of a twist to get the setting otherwise I need to measure this read the gauge do all that adjusting this way is just quicker and that right there is pretty much the process for super sizing the capacity of your jointer using a planer flatten and a quarter-inch is usually plenty it could sure make this a half an inch if you had some really gnarly boards to deal with if you're one of the lucky folks that has a 24 inch jointer in your shop you don't need to worry about this whole video I'll add a couple notes it can be tricky when the lug is very shallow 1/32 of an inch or so because when you run the piece through that lug can climb up on the platen if it does that it planes the board crooked and you kind of ruined it so pay close attention to feeding the piece through the thickness planer on top of the plant so that the lug stays off of the planers top surface in case anybody's getting any bright ideas thinking well that's a pretty select trick I think I'm gonna patent that well I've been using a planer plan for quite a few years and some time back I submitted a platen pending for this idea so I'm already a step ahead of ya and I bet you wish you were to shut the video off before I got to that part anyways I appreciate you tuning in to next-level carpentry for this unscripted video I'm gonna try to put this together and get it published and uploaded and then as time allows get back to that sawhorse build video that I've been promising for so long I appreciate all the sharing you do for next level carpentry on insta goal twit face anything you can do to promote the channel helps me and I really appreciate it check out the Amazon influencers page link in the video description and he purchases made through links on that page don't cost you any more but Amazon helps support this channel with a slight ad fee that's paid from any purchases there I hope you'll consider subscribing if you haven't already and as always thanks for watching

Channel: Next Level Carpentry

Views: 179,388

Rating: 4.8693466 out of 5

Keywords: jointer, thickness, planer, plainer, planner, joiner, flatten, straighten, smooth, cup, bow, crook, twist, powermatic, dw735, matt jackson, next level carpentry, mathias wandel, woodwork, workshop, wood, milling, cabinet, pallet, fine woodworking, trick, pro tip, methods of work, magic, dewalt, rough, lumber

Id: vzmSjlXJ2fg

Length: 12min 43sec (763 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 19 2018