Thread: Cleaning up two large slabs of wood. Suggestions?

Find someone with a large enough buzzer and thicknesser, no point busting your butt trying to do it by hand if you don't have to.

I was thinking of contacting my local Men's Shed and seeing if they had a suitable thicknesser.

From memory they had a small unit. a 12 or 13" benchtop unit.
I was a bit worried about overloading it. Not sure if 20' of timber would be ok or too much.
I may just have to ask.

It'll handle it, you'll just have to take lots of small passes.

Originally Posted by elanjacobs

Find someone with a large enough buzzer and thicknesser, no point busting your butt trying to do it by hand if you don't have to.

Or someone with a Resaw or bandsaw mill. One cut on my mill and one pass thru the thicky, job done

Edge joint 'em and glue them together first, then clean up the work surface.

finding someone with a 600mm wide jointer or thicky is probably near impossible, so instead look for someone with a woodwiz.

Alternatively machine them first individually on your local men's shed unit and glue them together later. If you use some biscuits for the joint, the glue line should need minimal clean up afterwards.

Originally Posted by Acco

Or someone with a Resaw or bandsaw mill. One cut on my mill and one pass thru the thicky, job done

Would it be practical to try it on my own bandsaw?

I have a 2hp Hafco unit with a 350mm throat that might make the cut.
I think a thicknesser would probably do a cleaner job though.

Alternatively machine them first individually on your local men's shed unit and glue them together later. If you use some biscuits for the joint, the glue line should need minimal clean up afterwards.

I was leaning toward this method myself, on the basis that glueing up two pieces is not too different to the usual way of making a workbench by glueing multiple pieces together.

I have no shortage of planes and scrapers including a very nice 450mm long jointing plane.

your issue will be getting the final glue-up flat enough to be useful as a bench.
This will be very difficult to achieve just using a bandsaw to slice a bit off each slab.

If properly flat is not your final aim, there's really no need to glue the slabs together.

A good way to get your workbench top flat is to use a routersled to flatten the top after the bench has been assembled.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtkBZHLJyD0

- kuffy

I have had a good guy at Beenleigh flatten some large slabs of Huon Pine for me. His charge was very reasonable. I don't know if he is still doing it but PM me and I will give you his contact details. He actually collected and delivered the finished slabs back to me in Brisbane having jointed them and glued them too (before he flattened them so the surface was perfect). They were too big for me to handle at the time but he didn't seem to have any problems.

I recently used this method

I secured the wood to a bench with double sided tape.
Placed two pieces of patio tube either side of the slab and made a sled which my router can run on. Rest the sled on the patio tube and make passes over the slab.
Works great.
I used a large router bit from carbitool which worked a treat.