Thread: Resawing and thicknessing timber for box making

Save your pennies and buy a decent 15" thicknesser with a helical cutting head and you'll never look back

I use a lot of new floorboards about 12mm thick and I use a homemade thickness sander to remove the grooves in the back of the boards. Very cheap to build and worth it's weight in gold! I have a cheap thicknesser which I occasionally use but snipe wastes too much wood. Build the sander first then go on from there with expensive thicknessers etc.
Terry

Terry, would be interested to see how you constructed your thickness sander!

Andy

I use a wide drum sander, (AKA thickness sander), to clean up my resawed timber. Works fine and is quieter than a jointer or planer/thicknesser. 80G to thickness, then 120G followed by 240G. Almost no sanding needed after that.
It is slower than a thicknesser, though, and needs good dust extraction.

Edit: Mine's a factory-made one, so no point in showing it. I'd like to see Terry's too, though, out of interest.

Originally Posted by andycap

Terry, would be interested to see how you constructed your thickness sander!

Andy

I'm interested in seeing this sander too, been looking at making one myself.

I hadn't thought of using floorboards Terry that's not such a bad idea. I would also be interested in seeing how you built your sander so i can get some more ideas.

thanks
Woodwormer

Originally Posted by tdrumnut

I'm interested in seeing this sander too, been looking at making one myself.

Hello,

I have built this one. Am quite chuffed with it.

Pat Hawley's thickness sander

Link to plans at bottom of page.

If you've never been to that web site before its well worth a look around at what other people have built and what plans are available - I think quite a lot of people have built the sander and the bandsaw from these plans.

Bill

You gonna build your own sander? Sounds great.

There have been a number of threads on building a drum sander.
Here's one:
https://www.woodworkforums.com/f44/an...-build-166500/

And these two threads go together to make up another drum sander build. It's the same one built by steamingbill: -
https://www.woodworkforums.com/f11/pulleys-163071/
https://www.woodworkforums.com/f40/my...sander-164659/

I would love to post photos of my drum thickness sander but none of my photos show the completed job. Go to Mathias Wandell's website Woodworking for engineers and there are a number of home built units to look at. Most are very similar to the one I built using advice etc from a number of units that I saw among them Pat Hawleys one.
Mine cost about $150 as I had to buy the motor, pulley and belt and the 1 inch bar to hold the series of MDF discs. I also had to purchase the wide velcro. The most expensive would be the bearings and fortunatly I had them on the shelf.
Go for it, you won't be dissapointed.
Terry

I'm gonna chuck another vote in for the sander.

I dunno if it does a better job than jointing/thicknessing or not, but a sander should be able to get you nice and close if you want to match the grain around the mitred corners of a box...which can look pretty darn good if you get it spot on. Probably more so with something a little more figured that Tassie Oak.

Before you spend a lot of money on a thicknesser to make a few boxes, why not try using a good hand plane? (You will need a decent plane anyway to fine tune the corners if they are going to be mitered.)

Cut your pieces close to the desired thickness, scribe the desired thickness on both sides and then manually plane them down to the scribes lines. It's quiet, doesn't make any dust and doesn't take very long.

It might be easier to cut them near to the desired thickness on the tablesaw using a thin blade - you will get a more consistent thickness unless you are a wizz with the bandsaw.

Originally Posted by starr

Before you spend a lot of money on a thicknesser to make a few boxes, why not try using a good hand plane? (You will need a decent plane anyway to fine tune the corners if they are going to be mitered.)

Cut your pieces close to the desired thickness, scribe the desired thickness on both sides and then manually plane them down to the scribes lines. It's quiet, doesn't make any dust and doesn't take very long.

It might be easier to cut them near to the desired thickness on the tablesaw using a thin blade - you will get a more consistent thickness unless you are a wizz with the bandsaw.

+1 for using a sharp handplane

That drum sander is awesome! I HAVE to build it