Thicknessing

[Southern Cross]

Newbie to guitar building, and I am slowly acquiring tools. If you are buying a machine to thickness, should you get a thickness sander or a thickness planer? My friend who has helped me has a thickness sander, but I see a lot of thicknessing planers for sale also. Please let me know your opinions on the differences, and suitability for guitar building. Thanks.
Clifford

[saltytri]

Thickness sander, hands down. A planer tends to tear the surface, especially when working with figured woods. I found this to be true even with a helical carbide cutter head.

[Rodger Knox]

Sander for sure. Planers work really nicely down to about 1/4" to 3/16", any thinner and there's a pretty good chance it will destroy the board, and it's worse on figured wood.

[Southern Cross]

Thanks for the advice. I will definitely go for a sander when I buy one.

[mirwa]

Whilst yes I have a sander, it is not my go to choice.

I enjoy using a hand plane for thicknessing and definetly cheaper and more versatile of a tool choice.

[dekutree64]

That looks just like the block plane I use for thicknessing Except I ground 4 notches into the blade using a dremel wheel, which makes it a bit easier to use, especially on super hard and/or figured woods. Finish up with a card scraper.

Thicknessing by hand is hard at first, but gets easier. A sharp blade is the main thing, but also technique. Rosewoods tend to work best with the blade aimed straight across the grain, but moving at 45 degrees. Softwoods usually work better moving in-line with the grain.

[JDaniel]

I use both; a Primus smoothing plane and a 19" drum sander. I broke down and started using power tools a couple a years ago after 40 yrs of using hand tools. No regrets - my new drum sander makes for fast and precise thicknessing.

[redir]

Like JDaniel I use both too. I used to use a planer with a backer board to get close but you need to make sure your blades are nice and sharp and forget about figured wood. I've seen a couple back sets explode in my planer so getting a drum sander was one of the best purchase I ever made. It's very useful for many things.

But I always plane the braced side with a smoothing plane by hand. A knife makes a better cut in the end. Sand paper striates the top while the knife edge cuts the cells smoothly. The striated top is actually weaker so in theory you can have a thinner top using hand planes. Think of the striations like little kerfed saw marks.

Since I typically sand the whole entire outside of the guitar I don't bother planning the outside of the top and so I run that through the thickness sander to get my desired deflection. Sometimes I use a scraper blade to finish off the top but it's tricky and often times leaves marks.

[Alan Carruth]

I've been using one of the old Wagner Safety Planers for 40+ years. I'm on my third set of cutters. If you have a drill press it's a great way to go, but you have to use it right. I can still count to ten...

First; bear in mind that the term 'safety' is aspirational when applied to any power tool. This is versatile tool, but it doesn't care what it bites. The lip above the cutters helps, but it's up to you to know where your fingers are. I find that one habit helps here: always have your fingers pointing away from it. You can have your hand right on top of the thing and be perfectly alright, but if you point a finger into it, it will nip.

The other main safety tip is to feed wood against the tool, not in the direction that it wants to pull it in. Your muscles only work one way at a time; if it's trying to pull the wood out of your hands as you feed it in, you don't have control, and it will toss it across the shop.

Other than that the biggest helps are to have a big table on the drill press, and adjust it so that it's dead perpendicular to the quill. After that, keep it sharp, and keep it cutting. As with routers, the heat of cutting is carried off in the chips; of it's not making chips it will burn.

I can make .5mm veneer with this thing, although it's not a great way to spend a day. I usually set it up to cut about .2mm (.008") over size, and finish up with a sharp scraper. When properly sharpened and used it cuts pretty cleanly on figured wood. Don't use it to remove more than about .002" on dead end grain, though; that gets rough.

[Jcamp]

I’m not sure if ur trying to build 1 guitar or a 100 but if your not going into business building them I wouldn’t buy either one. Id bum my buddy’s sander. The planner ain’t ur best option but can b had for $300+ new. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a used thickness sander for under $800 so I’m sure they r over a grand new.

[charles Tauber]

I view it as follows:

A hand plane - with or without a scraper - will thickness any wood in any dimension. An abrasive thickness sander will thickness most kinds of wood, some it just chokes on and clogs the abrasive, burning the wood. A thickness planer will thickness some woods, but destroy others, particularly highly figured or heavily reversing grain.

A hand plane is the most physically demanding, and requires good planing/sharping skills: it is quiet and nearly dust-free. An abrasive thickness sander can accurately, uniformly work on very thin materials below 1 mm, and can be used to thickness non-wood materials, like bone for nuts and saddles - a hand plane doesn't work on those. Dust collection isn't optional and needs to be figured into the cost and space required. If I were to buy a thickness planer, I'd spend the extra and get a helical cutter head - it will reduce tear-out on figured woods, but still has some practical limitations on minimum thickness.

What to buy depends upon what sort of skills you want to develop, how much shop space you have, the quantity of wood you are thicknessing and how much you are willing to invest. Appropriate hand planes and sharpening mechanisms will likely run you $200 to $500, but won't take up much space, but will be boat anchors until you learn how to sharpen them and use them.

A suitable thickness sander, with dust collection, can be had for around $1000 and up - I made one 30 years ago when the cheapest available were wide-belt industrial machines starting at tens of thousands of dollars. With today's machines available for as little as $500 or so, I don't recommend making one. The surface texture off of the sander I have is nowhere near a finished surface: it is full of deep striations regardless of grit of abrasive used. The surface texture needs to be removed using hand planes, scrapers or hand-held sander. Lost of noise, takes up a lot of space in a small shop.

A thickness planer excels at machining bigger, thicker lumber, such as necks, neck laminations, etc. To be effective, one usually pairs a thickness planer with a jointer. Just running a warped or twisted board through a thickness planer will result in a uniform-thickness warped or twisted board. One face should be "true" prior to planing the board to thickness by removing wood from the opposite face of the board. In the absence of a jointer, you are back to hand planing one face (and edge), or fooling with router jigs and other mechanisms. If you are doing much of it, you'll want some form of dust/chip collection. A few years ago, I replaced the cutter head on my jointer with a helical one. The helical cutter head is SO much better in so many ways, that I wouldn't recommend buying one that isn't - on jointer or planer - unless finances prohibit it.

I have all three - hand planes, thickness sander and thickness planer. Having all three allows more options in how to work with the materials. I started out more than three decades ago with a single hand plane and an oil stone to sharpen it.

[Alan Carruth]

A good reply from Charles. My only disagreement with him is to say that you can hand plane bone, but some planes are better then others for this. The tool steel cutters such as Hock, made of A-2 and D-2 steel at a high temper, are too brittle for use on such hard stock: I have never been able to sharpen one so that it will hold an edge without chipping the tool. I've had the best luck with an old Stanley low-angle block plane, sharpened to a short bevel. This works well on bone and holds up for a surprisingly long time. With the appropriate jigs it will thickness nuts and saddles smoothly, precisely, and quickly. You might be able to use one of the fancier irons if you drew some of the temper and sharpened it right.

[LeightonBankes]

a good square 2x4, 2 ft. long, with sandpaper glued to it. It's a great workout, but after wearing yourself out 5 times, you have a pretty flat board for about $7-8 in materials

[charles Tauber]

Originally Posted by Alan Carruth

My only disagreement with him is to say that you can hand plane bone, but some planes are better then others for this.

Thanks for your disagreement. I'll have to try what you suggest.