I have been useing my MFT 1080 for just about everythng that I have ever seen mentioned from production cross cutting by making full use of the width uf the table and lining up several pieces to be cut at same time, ripping, squaring of cuts, and so on. One use i have not seen yet is flattening out warped lumber. I have a couple of 18" x 12' and 2 16"x12' #2 pine that I ran across about three years ago. I also have a piece of 15"x6' clear pine. (rescued from a demolition project, so a few nicks & scratches) All of these, being that you just don't find lumber that wide any more, have resided on my storage rack for years. recently, I did a little rearranging and all of the above were unstacked and restacked, all of which must have upset the status quo of the moisture content and they all started to get a little curl. I have a small "honeydoo" project for THE BOSS that will make use of the 15"x6' board. That, having been on the top of the pile had developed a warp of nearly 1-1/2" from side to side. I had a lot of snow plowing ahead of me, so i placed the board on my MFT and clamped it with the crown side down and clamps along each side.
My first clamps were applied thru the holes of the MFT, but as i tightened, I noticed I was pulling the mft swisscheese portion up to meet the lumber. I undid the clamping and reset 4 clamps into the clamping channels at each end of the MFT and pulled the edges of the lumber down close to flat. I then reset 4 more clamps thru holes along the edge of the boards and just snugged them down. About 4 hours later, i found the clamps along the MFT top had loosened up, so i tightened them up. This time, i was able to draw both edges of the board flat along their entire length. That was over a week ago. this morning, i decided to check and I went down to loosen all of the clamps. The board is absolutely flat. No curl whatsoever.. The table top has remained totally flat.
I will be starting work on the project later today (hopefully) and will not have to do any planing to get started. This is important, as the boards will be too wide to run thru my 12-1/2" planer. Any planing would have to be done with hand planes. Eventually, the Rotex 150 will be applied, but other than that, everything will be flat enough for starting the project (A tabletop & lazy susan to mount the kitchen located TV so it can be watched from either kitchen, or living room. About 90º to 120º rotation) I will do the ends sort of bread board style with either red oak or walnut for the ends. Not much of the wide board pine will show, but a little. I am mainly interresed to see how the wide board reacts with time before I start attacking the 12 foot wideboards for some future projects in mind. The first part of the experiment, flattening a badly cupped board with the MFT, has been successful.
Tinker
