Hand tools? Or a jointer & planer?

[john molloy]

make a router sleigh if you are on a budget .you already have a router .if you are new to woodwork you should be experience the joy of using hand tools .not many tools can give the finish a hand plane can .the whistle of a sharp handplane is lovely .woodwork is forgiving and a great hobby .especially if it is hand made you will look at it different if it is in your house .the end product is not were all the fun is .it is in the making

 

[FOGNewbie]

One thing to consider is production volume. If you are a hobbyist making couple of pieces of furniture a year from S2S lumber having A3 will be total waste. I never had proper bench, but it did not stop me from using hand planes. You can rig up sturdy and removable surface. You don't need fancy planes either. There are plenty of options. Router sleds, ts saw for joining, etc.

Totally agree! You can also sure up an inexpensive bench by attaching plywood to the sides and back. I did this with an inexpensive Sjobergs bench several years ago. After screwing the pieces plywood the the legs, I've had no racking issues. Basically the cross members for the MFT are doing the same thing.

 

[ear3]

Depends on the type of warping in the board.  If the board is cupped, then the planer will deal with it just fine.  But if the board is bowed or twisted then you have to get more creative (like planer sled), or go with hand tooling.  I just try to make sure when getting rough lumber that the warping is limited to cupping.  After planing it, I use the tracksaw to gradually work my way to final width, making sure to leave some margin for wood movement after the first cut.

Having a tracksaw and a long rail will cover many of the bases you would otherwise need a jointer for.  By just adding a decent planer, you will be able to surface and true up rough lumber, provided it's not overly twisted or cupped.

Its always been my impression that you must have one flat surface to run through a planer.  Jointer can get that beginning flat surface.  Tracksaw does fine for straightening one edge of a board.  But flattening one face?  A planer with its pressure rollers  will follow the dips in the face of a board.  Planer uses its rollers to force the face down onto the surface.  Then smooth the other side.  And when the board comes out of the planer and no longer has the rollers putting pressure on the board, it goes back to being wavy, with a smooth face on the other side.  Planer does not flatten the board unless one side starts flat when it is pushed into the planer.

 

[adcolor]

I'm a fan of jointer/planer machines. Hand planes are great, and could work with a good planer (the DW735X is a great planer in its category, you can upgrade the head to a helical later if you like). Jet makes a 12" machine that is impressive (the 10" is a lower class machine), and occupies only slightly more space than an 8" jointer.  What you CAN do with a tool is not the same as what you can do with your (unpaid but) valuable time.  I can plane a face of a board reasonably flat, but my time has some value, as I am not fast at it, and there are usually several boards that need work. The Jet may be on sale this weekend (10%) at Woodcraft and others. Still ~$3k for a helical head machine.

Others may be as good, including Laguna (just adding in another brand -- many of there machines are also Europe sourced). The buying/upgrading/etc of machines has a lot to do with you figuring out your style (aside from buying junk in the first place).  Having a reference surface for the other sides is the key to making that board 4 square, which makes it easy to make the next stage, ad infinitum, as you progress in your wood working.

Having no reference will leave you a frustrated woodworker with very slow progression in skills and quality of work.  Whatever direction you decide to go, commit to it until you reach a fork in the road (reached a limit in your results  you are doing or level of projects you can attain). 

Nothing wrong with your Festool equipment. It will make it easy to do a lot of the things you will want to do.  A combo machine is good -- as long as you have a process in mind in terms of set ups when you convert modes. I learned when I had an old Shopsmith to not have more than a couple of things (and never including my table saw) a single machine can do. Set up would just kill me.  Especially if I had to go back and make more of a part. If you are meticulous, then it will be a satisfying exercise to build and be organized in the flow and set ups.  Like all things, situations and requirements/limitations force us to make compromises (like a combo machine and set ups due to space limitations).

 

[charley1968]

I'd recommed the planer/thicknesser. But: i almost exclusivly work in yellow pine, cuz that's the only lumber i can get. Most inexpensive boards come with one planed side, so a thicknesser enables me to plane stock into dimensions i need/use. It gives me the best bang for the buck.
Would i be living in an area where there's abundant hardwood, i'd be working with handtools.
I think it's fun to work with handtools, but it takes time and to get comparable results, some training.

 

[TheSergeant]

I've been transitioning over to doing a lot of hand tool work lately but I don't think I could give up my planer or jointer.  They just make such quick work of dimensioning lumber, which is the most boring part of woodworking in my opinion.  I'd much rather get my wood to dimension quickly so that I can spend the time on parts I actually enjoy like joinery. 

I agree with others regarding a combo machine.  However, you don't have to spend major $$ to get one.  Keep an eye out for an Inca 510, 550, 560 or 570 jointer/planer combo machine.  They have 10-1/4" jointing/planing capacity and have  pretty small footprint. 

If you want to go the hand tool route I'd suggest getting a 14" band saw.  I've done a lot of projects where I'm able to hand plane a face, resaw it to thickness on the band saw, and then clean it up quickly with a few strokes of a plane.  With a well tuned band saw you can get really, really close to your final dimensions and with a few strokes a plane get it dialed in perfect without the need for a planer.   

 

[Dan-]

What seems to be left out of this discussion is the necessity of good dust collection, which will run at least $2k from Oneida or ClearVue. You also have to factor in the cost of ducting (or S&D pipe). That's not the worst part (IMHO) because money is just cash flow, but space taken up by a stationary object is (semi)permanent. So you lose a 4x3 space for a good DC and then you lose the space for the jointer or combo machine. So you lose not only $5k+ but also 20 square feet of your shop.

 

[derekcohen]

Hi guys,

I'm at a bit of a proverbial fork in the road and I'm just not sure which path to take.  To explain, I'm still fairly new to woodworking, but I have accumulated a fair bit of Festool kit... the tracksaw, CT 26, MFT set, Kapex, CMS and router, and Domino are the major components I have.  However, this is basically ALL of the major woodworking gear I have.  Notably absent from this list are a jointer and planer, either in power tool or hand tool form.

I'm also dealing with a relatively small space for my shop, roughly 220 sq ft.  So I have very little tolerance for any tool that won't be extraordinarily useful because my free space is getting slim.

I really don't know which tool route to take to simply mill a board 4-square.  For the time being, I've bought some wood surfaced two sides from an online site (Woodworker's Source) and I will probably plan to do so for the foreseeable future, with my rationale being that I won't have to usually flatten this stock and then plane it, and assuming that I like the thickness as is.  But even then, this doesn't seem to be a foolproof approach.  The last S2S board I bought recently was in good shape for the most part, but even it wasn't perfect and one stick out of a picture frame I was making was slightly twisted and basically put me dead in the water with the project.

To me, the downside of buying a planer (assuming I can get by with my TS 55 as the edge jointer) is the space it will occupy in my shop.  Granted, something like the DeWalt DW735 13" planer isn't a huge footprint, but it's still something, and will also require (I guess) a Dust Deputy or similar to handle the chunks.  On the other hand, the downside of hand tools like jack & jointer planes is the sheer time that seems to be involved.  If I were making something like this simple picture frame again and needed to flatten out one stray stick member, the idea of using hand tools to flatten that stick - and then thickness the other three members to compensate - just seems a little sadistic.  Don't get me wrong... the idea of hand tools really intrigues me.  But the time involved with them just to flatten & thickness lumber in this example "scares" me.  In fairness, I have no idea how long an exercise like that would take, but my guess is it would be orders of magnitude more than using power tools.

Can you guys give me some advice here?  Thanks!

I have transitioned over the years from separate jointer and planers (thicknesser in Australia) to a Hammer A3-31 combo with a spiral head and digital readout. For my needs (weekend warrior), this is about as ultimate as I could want. It takes up little space, but (as was pointed out) you do need dust control as well. Still, it is expensive, and there are work arounds.

Keep in mind that I am also primarily handtool woodworker, and strongly believe that everyone should own and develop skills with handplanes. For the first 20 years of my woodworking I did not have a jointer or a planer/thicknesser. Learning to 4-square with a jack/jointer/smoother is time well spent.

Given that one can use handplanes, then there are these alternatives:

1. plane a face and edge flat and square, and then rip off a board on the bandsaw. Here is an old pictorial I wrote: http://www.inthewoodshop.com/Furniture/Preparing a board without a thicknesser.html

2. Get a jointer before a planer/thicknesser so that you can plane a reference side quickly (rather than having to take out the twists and turns with a handplane), and then resaw with the bandsaw. I wrote about this in Pop Wood about 2 editions ago (final article in the magazine).

3. One can get a board coplanar (not flat) with handplanes, and then send it through a planer/thicknesser. Then flip the board and do the other side.

4. Or use wedges to secure a twisty board on a sled, and run it through a thicknesser/planer .... but I hate this method since most machines are slow and really LOUD.

5. All handplanes! Not difficult at all. The more you do it, the easier/faster it gets. Here is a quick pictorial: http://www.woodworkforums.com/f152/planes-flattening-table-tops-209671#post1986147

It is not OK to use a Dust Deputy and vacuum cleaner to extract from a thicknesser. It simply will not catch the chips or the fine dust. I tried, unsuccessfully years ago with a Fein. You need a minimum of a 2 hp (preferably 3 hp) dust extractor and ideally 6" hoses.

Regards from Perth

Derek