Rough-sawn 4/4 -> 3/4" D2S, mostly by hand
Jeremy Osner
>(Note: I am assuming you have reasonably straight lumber to begin with.)
I. Prepare 1 surface
A. Select the better surface -- without excessive tearout or wane.
B. Use a scrub plane to remove all milling marks. After you think they are all gone, look closely at the board and you may see a fainter set of marks under the ones you removed.
C. Use jointer and jack planes to make the board flat. Since I am assuming your lumber was pretty straight to begin with, this should not take too long. I use the jack to take out any waviness that the scrub put in, and then the jointer to make sure it is even.
D. Use smoother plane to remove any marks or roughness.
II. Resaw
A. Mark the desired thickness, using your flat side as reference.
B. Cut on your bandsaw. (Hey, I said mostly by hand, ok?)
III. Prepare opposite surface
A. Identify primary high spots by checking the line you marked -- if you are like me it is very difficult to resaw straight and there will be places where the board is visibly thicker than desired. Knock these off quickly with the scrub plane.
B. To identify more high spots, take a few passes along the length of the board with your jack or jointer. The places where saw marks remain are lower. Use your scrub plane to get everything pretty close to the same height, then jack and jointer to finish off as before. You may end up with one or two spots where the saw marks are quite low and you don't want to take off that much thickness from the whole board -- depending on what you are using the board for, you may want to plane a slight depression there with your smoother to remove the marks -- the board will not be exactly flat then, but there are many applications where it does not actually need to be.
C. Smooth.
