Re: Planning to less than 1/2� thick w/ 20" JET
William Duffield, on the Cohansey
>A carriage is a good place to start. Sometimes, I just put a smooth, flat board through the planer and clamp it to the infeed table to raise the work, but that doesn't always work. As Dave implies, the main problem with planing thin stock with a power planer is the flexibility of the wood. With stiff but not brittle wood, you can get away with planing it thinner, but other stuff will start bouncing up and down under the planer blades and shatter into splinters. There are several ways to work around the problem. As Dave says, you can start with double stick carpet tape, but that's not practical if you are, for example, making many, many shaker boxes. An alternative for production work is to build a carriage with an interior chamber and holes in the top surface and a vacuum supply to hold the wood to it. A quicker and easier alternative is a Performax abrasive planer in addition to the one you have. The widest Performax has a 22" wide belt, about the same as your whirling blade planer. You'll like the Performax. It has good dust control, and swapping sandpaper is really easy. An alternative strategy is to resaw on the bandsaw and then use the Performax, because it wastes less wood.