Introduction: Joining and Planing Oversized Plank for a Bench Seat.

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This will show how to take a raw piece of lumber (12 inches)  that is wider than the joiner (8inches) and still finish it nicely and correctly.

So for this project I used the following:

8 Inch Joiner
16Inch Planer
Vice Grips

Step 1: The Joiner

This is an 8 inch Joiner, and I have an 11 inch wide plank of wood and it is all sorts of crook and bowed !!

To plane a piece of wood, a generally flat bottom is required. To do this you need to run it on the joiner, but if your wood is larger than the joiner you immediately think you have been defeated.

This joiner had a spring loaded guard that covers the blade, which is a great safety feature, but limits you to doing a minimum size of wood 8 inches or less.

No worries. This guard can be safely removed and carefully used to plane a piece of wood up to 16 inches wide.

Step 2: Removing Spring Guard

The red piece is the spring guard, and in the vice grips is the spring pin.

I simply loosened a set screw holding the large swing arm pin in place and lifted it out.

Then pull the small spring pin out and voila! Now you can CAREFULLY plane over sized pieces of wood.

Step 3: Joining - 1

I recommend when joining, to do end grain first and in very very small increments to reduce chip out.  And the fact that you do it first, if it does chip out, the chipped out material will most likely be removed when surface planing.


Step 4: Joining - 2

When joining try and consider the grain direction when putting it through the joiner. 

You want the blades to slice off wood the best it can, not CHIP out against the grain. This rule might be broken during this exercise just because you can only join both sides of this large face by rotating it 180 degrees.

Also this technique doesn't leave a perfect result from joining, but if there is major bow as there was in this case, it made it flat but not pretty as you can see the step or the overlap created from where the 8 inch section of the joiner overlaps itself on the 12 inch piece of wood. In this case it is flat and good enough to run through the planer which will make the surface easy to finish.

Step 5: Planing

I Joined 1 face and one edge.

Now I take it to the planer.  I start with planing the opposite side down using the joined side as the flat reference.

Once the side i was planing was flat, I flipped it and planed the other side (The joined side). So I now have 2 flat faces parallel to each other and one edge at a perfect 90 degrees to those faces.

Then I take it back to the joiner to take care of the last edge.  Using the flat face as a reference against the fence I join the edge so now everything is in parallel and tangent.

Once you're finished don't forget to put the guard back on the joiner, and also clean up the mess. A clean safe shop, is a happy shop.