Flattening Jig

Forced break from working on knives was significantly longer than I wanted it to be but this week I finally could advance a bit with making of the cutting boards. I finally solved the problem of roughly flattening the prefabricates. The solution is not particularly elegant but it works. And it is my second attempt – the first one, using an electric hand planer, ended up in a disaster whose only result was the need to buy a new planer.

When it became apparent that electric planer is not the right tool for the job, I decided to build a jig for a wood router. The starting materials were: a particle board, a few off-cuts of steel piping of various thicknesses and a few pieces of black locust wood.

I won't go into details because I do not think it is worth it. As I said, it is not particularly elegant solution, but it works and it cost practically nothing.

The router has 8 mm holes for fixing an edge guide. I used them fot the sled – the router rides on two 8 mm rods across the worked piece. For movement along the worked piece there are two pieces from black locust wood riding over two 16 mm steel pipes. The flattening process is as follows: I run the roter across the piece and back, I move the rods half the diameter of the router bit along and repeat until the end. With 20 mm bit even a fairly big piece is flattened relatively quickly.

It makes a huge mess. I tried to connect the vacuum but it was not very effective, the wood chips flew everywhere anyways.

With time, I might invest some work into improving or maybe even completely reworking the jig but for now, I used it to flatten all the pre-glued boards and now I intend to concentrate on finishing them. I hope to be able to write about some progress next week.