Idea for planing wood slab

Hi everyone, I’m in the midst of building a dining table and need to plane flat two pieces of wood. I looked at some tutorials and a router sled + belt sander combination seems to be the go to method, but I don’t have space for that. Do you guys have any other ideas?

What are the dimensions of your slabs? We could do a jointer sled to use on the thickness planer then just thickness plane it

Thanks Mike. one is about 13 inches across the other is about 15 inches across, both are 65 inches long and approximately 2ish inches thick.

The tutorial you shared looks like a good way to go about it. I’ll go into hack space and measure to see if my boards will fit through the planer. Are you going to be around next week? If you’re free can you give you a crash course on using it?

Thanks
Angie

Our planer is 13" wide so I think we are out of luck there, but happy to give you a rundown anyway

Thanks Mike. Let me know when you plan to be in the space and I’ll pop by with some smaller trial pieces.

I’ll be there on Wednesday night for the wood shop meeting at minimum; we could play with it afterward.

I’ll give you a shout on Slack when else I’ll know I’ll be down there.

Other than using a handplane and winding sticks, your best bet is going to be a router sled with some shims and/or wedges underneath the board to stabilize it while you are routing the top surface flat.

At this point I think i’m just in a youtube black hole. The router sled combo idea seems to be the most viable. Although the hand plane, winding sticks seems like something I could do in my apartment without being a nuisance.

I think I should just dive in an try a bunch of things on my offcuts.

Sidenote: I may have bitten off more than I can chew

Haha, but that’s how you grow.

If this is your first time with hand planes, I recommend getting a gnarley board from the home depot and practicing on that.

We can try practicing the router sled on your offcuts if you want; I’ve never done this method but I’m familiar with the concept and have done the youtube blackhole myself.

Just make sure your handplane is well sharpened and tuned up. I recommend a #5 jack plane with a cambered iron (for faster material removal) rather than the ubiquitous #4 smoothing planes that seem to be everywhere.

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