24 March, 2014

A jointing sled for my 13" lunchbox planer.

Now I have read on any number of woodworking forums that you should buy an 8" jointer, and just bypass the 6" all together because your stock might be wider than your jointer bed... That's all well and good until you start of with say 8.5" wide stock. What do you do then?

I recently ran into that problem, and used the old jointing sled trick for the planer. It is so painfully simple that it should just be called a hunk of wood and a hot glue gun. Literally, a piece of plywood and a hot glue gun...

Shop tools and jigs just don't get any simpler than this!

So what I did here was took a piece of 3/4" cabinet grade plywood that I verified to be dead flat with a known good straight edge, and cut it to size. In this case 48" long which is the factory width of the plywood sheet, and as long as the stock I will be working with. I cut it 13" wide (okay 12-15/16" wide) to be able to be slid through my 13" Ryobi planer.

Wide piece of walnut on the sled waiting to be hot glued and
run through the planer.

The method of mounting a workpiece to the sled is simple, pick your direction to mount the wood to the sled, grain orientation / etc.. and the hot glue the board to the sled. Then run it through the planer until it is flat.

The idea for the planer sled came from http://www.thewoodwhisperer.com/videos/episode-6-the-jointers-jumpin/ and details can be seen in his video at the 11:10 time index mark.

For those that are even more space cramped in their shops, I would highly recommend this planer sled, and using it double duty as a jointing sled for the table saw as shown in the Wood Whisperer video.  I have seen the arguments ad nauseum about folks needing a jointer before a planer. And I will state it here clearly, and plainly. You don't necessarily NEED either. It is easier to get by without a jointer than it is a planer, but lacking either, or both is not an insurmountable hurdle. You just need to make some common sense jigs and get good at using them!

No comments:

Post a Comment