Actual moron here.
I want to understand how to make wood flat. When I watch things on youtube the explanations don't make sense in my moron brain.
I understand you put things through a planer and that seems like it should be enough but then they're like PUT THIS SIDE THROUGH A JOINTER TO GET YOUR REFERENCE EDGE PARALLEL TO MY wiener N' BALLS THEN GET ON YER TABLE SAW N' RIP IT WITH A JIG MADE FROM EGYPTIAN GOLD N' USE YOUR 40K WOODPECKER TO CHECK FER SQUARE and I just get lost because I'm dumb.
Can someone clarify the terms and order of operations to get wood perfectly flat and level to a beginner?
planer make flat
jointer make square
thread make me sad
Op here.
Thread make me sad too 🙁
>planer make flat
>planer doesn't make flat
>if you don't use shims it will not.become flat, implying planer DOES make flat
WHAT THE FRICK DOES A PLANER ACTUALLY FRICKING DO AAAAAAAAAA
That anon is only semi-correct about the tools and procedures, and terrible at explaining it for the same reason you are terrible at understanding it: you keep using the term "flat" to mean other things.
Forget flat for a moment- what matters in milling lumber is *straight* edges and faces, and faces that are *paralell* to each other or evenly aligned along their entire length.
The illustration in
shows a real problem but the wrong solution- a board that is warped or bent along its length or has no even edge is exactly where a jointer is primarily used, with no wedges or shims involved. It makes long edges straight and is especially useful on narrow boards. Once you have one straight edge you can use that against a table saw fence to cut the board down into smaller pieces with evenly parallel cut edges that match.
A planer uses a similar cutter, but clamps and feeds wider board faces through the knives so that those wide faces are parallel to each other and the board has an even *thickness*.
If one face is dead flat to the table part already then the resulting cut will eventually make the board flat...but if the board is cupped or arched *across* its face what can happen is that the clamping/ feed pressure will just bend the board flat and it will spring back to that curve when it comes out, just thinner.
The faces will be paralell but the board won't be "flat", even when it is dead straight in the lengthwise dimension.
That's the problem with the term "flat" in this context, it implies straight lines and evenly paralell planes in all directions and each tool is optimized to fix one or the other, although there's some instances where either can do the job.
planers make a board have a uniform thickness. Uniform thickness doesn't mean flat. If you run a curved (think banana shaped) board through a planer it will still come out shaped like a banana.
Planer sands off the warped top and bottom until you are left with a piece of wood with even thickness all over... Which essentially makes it lay flat
Butcher board is a great example project for using a planer. You glue it all together and then plan it down a bunch so that the pieces are even with each other and gives you a smooth feeling, almost as if it were one piece of wood.
Jointer is to square it up so that it is the shaped the way you expect unwarped dimensional lumber to be
End grain butcher block is actually a bad idea in a planer, you'll get tearout throughout the surface. A Drum Sander is the right tool for that.
Planers shave wood flat, they don’t bend wood flat
you are moronic. there is nothing we can do.
I'm moronic
So planer make flat
You buy some shitty warped 2x4 and run it through the planer and it becomes flat.
Is the jointer basically for the sides alone? You say square but isn't a jointer basically performing the same sanding/cutting operation as a planer just on an upended 2x4's sides?
And why do people then take this shit to the tablesaw and rip the sides to boot? Is a planer and and a jointer not enough to complete a goddamn flattening?
Again, moronic
If you are gonna buy something, get the planer—it’s A LOT harder to manually plane something than it is to manually joint.
Yes, jointers are for the edges.
Wood warps, you can’t put warped stuff through a jointer.
Putting a 2x4 through a planer isn’t a great idea either, but you can screw it to a plywood base and shim areas that are too high.
Tablesaw works fine for jointing, there’s even a special jointing blade you can buy.
This makes some sense. thanks. Sounds like I can get a tablesaw and a jointing blade and just skip the jointer? That'd be great.
Can you elaborate on what the best use cases for a planer are if a 2x4 is dumb? I assumed this stuff was for getting accuracy in nice furniture. 2x4s probably shitty to use in such projects anyway and more of a structural thing? If I'm just trying to make an nice level workbench maybe a planer this isn't needed?
I cannot read, I am moronic.
A planer doesn’t make flat, it makes something smooth and even in thickness.
See pic, blue is planer, green is shims, red is bent 2x4 and purple is the part that will be taken off by planer.
If you don’t put shims, beam will go through like this and not become flat
Maybe more clear like this
Here is for jointer
Sal Kahn detected
Read, don't watch, how the machines work not what they do,then watch what they do you should be gtg
OP see if you can get some hands-on mentorship.
Easiest way would be to find a local makerspace and take a class or have one of the people show you the ropes.
If that's not possible maybe you can find some connection to a local carpenter/cabinetmaker/old timer hobbyist who would teach you some basics for a rack of beer.
I get erections around black people because of all the cuck porn. Can’t leave the house anymore
Planer does not make flat
Jointer makes a flat face.
Hold flat face against jointer fence to make flat and parallel edge.
Planer make other face parallel. If bottom face flat, then planed face flat.
Rip on table saw to get final flat and square edge.
not reading this thread but i was in a wood shop the other day and asked the guy a similar question.
so a jointer is like a cheese grater. you run the board over it and it cuts the high points until the surface is flat.
if you take that and flip it over, and plane the other side, yeah you have two flat sides. but they are unlikely to be parallel to each other.
like, the top left in this thing i drew. that would be a thing that could come off a jointer. both sides are flat, but they aren't parallel.
a planer is like, a cheesegrater that you can lift up a precise amount. so if the planer is like, 1" from the bottom, and you put something in it which is 1.2", it cuts off that 0.2"
you could put the board in the picture through the planer either way, it just would cut shit off the other side so they are now parallel.
and i mean you could theoretically do the same thing on the sides but you usually rip after the jointer instead of planing it, because you aren't going to have like an 8" gap on your planer to fit a 2x8 in, or whatever.
> cheese grater
Good idea. I’m going to use mine to grate up several hundred pounds of imitation crab meat.
never buy a unitasker. if it wasn't meant for shredding crab, why doesn't the manual tell me not to?
Don't feel bad OP. Flatness is actually a really deep rabbit hole. Dive into pic rel if you want to get even more confused. Or just accept that in practice, most woodworkers follow a procedure that works good enough in most cases even if it's not perfect or theoretically correct. That generally means jointing an edge or two, then using those as "flat enough" references to plane the rest down to size, and this is sufficiently accurate for the vast majority of cases.
I'm with op, even after reading all this I don't really understand it. This is not getting explained very well. I'm sure hands on learning would make a big difference but wow just because you can diy apparently doesn't mean you can teach.
router jig planer ftw
Americans are moronic and have moronic terminology.
Let's start with the machines you use. Planers remove material, they usually have reference plane, so you can get desired angle or parallel.
Surface planer (AmE: jointer-planer), used for removing material from the bottom. The most important part is that it has infeed and outfeed table. The outfeed table is your flat reference, it removes the material as in pic related.
Put wood through it, get one flat surface.
Put the other side through it, get a wedge - probably not what you want.
Thickness planer (AmE: planer) is another type of planer, but instead it removes the material from the top. It has the reference (infeed) table on the bottom, and is able to create a parallel cut on top.
Put wood with flat surface on bottom, get parallel flat surface on top.
Put wood shaped like a banana, get a banana (just with same thickness all along the piece).
Now, surface planer will also very likely have a guide on the side, that you can set to be square (90 degree). Or not, you may want a different angle sometimes.
This is the part that makes it a jointer (AmE: jointer), because you can take two pieces of wood with one side flat, and give them flat edge with same angle on the side, allowing you to join them.
With piece of wood with at least one flat surface and one flat and square edge, you can finally get parallel edge.
Put wood with flat square edge against the fence on the table saw, get a parallel square edge.
You can also use table saw only to get parallel edges on two sides, but you need the two planers mentioned before to get flat parallel surfaces.
>calls people moronic
>bemoans "moronic terminology"
> posts an entire novel without ever once using the word "straight"
what do you think flat means
>what do you think flat means
In the context of describing lumber and milling it, this-
>having the major surfaces essentially parallel and distinctly greater than the minor surfaces; example: a flat piece of wood
That's *not* the same thing as straight, a flat piece of wood can be any shape and lumber is routinely surface planed to thickness with undefined live edges that taper, curve, etc.
At that point it is said to be surfaced two sides, which brings up another reason people itt are not clarifying things: a board has four sides and the smaller sides are known as edges to differentiate them from the wider face sides. Hence terms like edge banding, rabetted edge, edge gluing, live edge, etc.
Calling the edges "sides" doesn't help clarify the matter at hand, it confuses it.
Same goes for calling the operation to straighten an edge "flattening" it, a bowed piece of lumber that won't lay flat on its wide face sides can have perfectly straight edges, and a board that lays perfectly flat in that manner can have any edge shape in plan view or profile.
Jointers are used a lot for straightening the edges of boards, but they are also useful for making convex curved joints in decidedly non-flat parts like barrel and conga drum staves as seen in picrel.
Even though the edges of those staves are not parallel or straight and the stave is bowed, the seam (joint) created when they fit together runs vertically straight along the convex shell form.
In fact the design of a modern jointer mimics the cooper's jointer, which was a giant plane that was oriented with the sole and blade facing up, with the work pushed against and over it.
http://www.inthewoodshop.com/ShopMadeTools/CoopersJointer.html
If all you need to do is make lumber and parts with straight, paralell edges or angled profiles that don't taper, a good table saw with the right blade can all but replace a jointer, which is a big part of why jointers aren't as common now as they were in the old days of basic table saws with limited or no-tilt arbors and shitty fences.
But for complex non-rectangular shapes like picrel where a table saw's straight cut can't make the necessary shapes (at least not safely), a jointer is indispensible.
But note that it's ultimate function is to create a straight joint where adjoining curved and angled edges meet.
It's called a jointer because its primary purpose is making clean, flat JOINTS.
Additional moronic person here. Please let me ask this
Just suppose I have 4 pieces of wood from the lumberyard that are mostly similar but have imperfections and a little warping like usual. Say I want to make super basic table legs out of them.
What is the exact order and correct machines to put them through that will make all 4 legs the same? The same thickess, the same flatness/straightness, the same squareness, the same length
just 4 rectangles that match.
You run the bottom on a jointer which gives you a flat face and a 90 degree corner to that face. You run the same bottom on the bottom of a planer to get you 2 parallel faces. You put the 90 face that was jointed against the fence of a table saw to get 3 milled faces, you then flip the board around and cut it on the tablesaw to get your final face. Cross cut with either the table saw or a miter saw to length on both ends.
Read this thread trying ro understand too and I feel like this is the closest but still is a pretty unclear explination. Yall motherfrickers need some explain-like-im-five vibes because not everyone has been doing this shit for 20 years
A planer makes wood thinner, not flat. The trick is to put the board on something that is already flat, with shims tacked in under any high spots so the planer can't push it down twisted against the bed, and just shaves off the high spots to create a flat face.
https://www.walkersww.com/blog/how-to-make-a-planer-sled
Somewhat related: I have two square sticks of wood that are slightly different sizes, only by a couple mm. Can I just clamp them together and go to town with a real coarse sanding block to even them out?
Just run it through a board stretcher, geez.