Problem with the setup I had already used was the sled didn’t ride the rails as nice or as easy as I’d hoped they would, even with using some wheels/casters as guides. Got some enclosed ball bearings for Christmas and decided to give those a try.

Had to add a spacer to accommodate the bearings so they’d ride on the inside of the rail. One obstacle out of the way, a couple more to go.

The next thing I decided to change was the fact nothing was really holding the rails in place except their own weight. Made for some pretty wishy washy planing. So decided to use the existing pipe stiles to get an even width on the rails.

Once all four of the pipe stiles were inserted and the rails were placed up alongside them, the width was even steven all the way along the 16’ length of the rails. But the pipe stiles stood proud of the rails by about 4 or 5 inches which wouldn’t allow the sled to pass beyond their location. Next step was to either go buy shorter pipe stiles or figure out something else. Chose the latter. Took some big eye bolts and opened the eye to accommodate a 1/2” pipe. Put it into the side of the table, and dropped the pipe stile down into the opening so the “stub” held the rail from moving in toward the other rail.

Sorry the image is way fuzzy. Gettin’ so excited to use this thing, my hand musta moved as I snapped the picture. I’ll try to get another one for the next blog post to give a better idea of what I’m talking about.

Anyway, this last tweak worked great! Kept the rails from moving any at all, and the width between rails remained very constant. Ball bearings helped immensely, but need to make one that runs on top of the rails, too.

Couple more minor modifications, and it should be where I need it to be.

Step 1: Scribe the lines:

I used a laser line from a cheapo level I bought at Home Depot a long time ago. You can’t really see the red laser line in the photo, but it’s there.




With all the lines scribed (I used a magic marker to be able to see the lines better – I may use my grinder with the chainsaw wheel to make a “guide” cut next time), next I had to figure out how to get this thing set up securely. Used a dolly to transport (weighs in over 200 lbs, and I ain’t a gonna even try lifting it), and got it upright on a pallet:

Once I got it on the pallet, I decided for the first two cuts, I’d use a ratchet tie-down to hold it secure:



Now I was ready to rock and roll. First cut:

Second cut:

Some really nice grain:

The next step was trying to figure out how I’d secure the piece in order to make the last cut. It was too narrow to keep on using the tie-down, so I shimmied the thing around and hammered some impromptu chucks down on the flat sides of the piece to hold it steady:

Worked really well. The piece didn’t move at all, thank goodness. I’d have a lot of explaining to do to my wife if I had had another accident with the chainsaw (put a 61 stitch cut across my left knee a few years back – no sympathy for stupidity, though, cuz it was my own dang fault).
The results of the last cut:


Again, some really nice grain. I’m amazed at the variations. Beautiful wood, that’s for sure. Finally, I stickered them inside my shop just in case there might still be a little moisture I need to let dry out.

Next phase – routing them down with my router planer. Very satisfied so far. Just need to get a little more practice with slabbing. Am thinking about a little bit longer chainsaw bar as my 20” doesn’t go all the way through on some of these types of logs, and my 32” bout’ kills me whenever I use it.

Sorry it took longer than I thought it would to do phase 2. Phase 1 kicked my butt so hard, I had to let these old bones heal up a little before goin’ at it again.

Thanks for looking.
TZH

Can’t really see the lines I scribed on the log using a laser line to guide the cut, but they’re there in the second photo. The log is about 48” long and varies in diameter from 14” to maybe 30” at the widest point.

Fired up the old Stihl 440 Magnum with a 20” bar and got to work cutting the first slab off:

Gonna need to learn how to do this better. Cut was just ok, not great. You can see where I missed the mark a coupla times, but will use the router planer later to take it down to flat. Gave the 440 a workout, too – guess I’ll need to sharpen the chain after each cut because it was pretty dull by the time I got done with this one.

Heartwood felt a little damp to the touch (even though these logs have been on the ground for 3-4 years and I’ve had them for almost a year) after slabbing it, so suggestions on how to keep it from warping as it dries would be appreciated.

Cutting one slab was enough of a workout for this day. Hopefully will be able to get to the second one tomorrow. Goal is to get three nice 1 1/2” to 2” slabs from each of the two logs I have.

Thanks for looking.
TZH

TZH

I started out with some really big cottonwood rounds (that’s my son in the first photo):

I cut them into 5” to 6” thick slabs and had to figure out a way to plane them down to 3” to 4” thick to use as table tops for TV stands and coffee tables. That’s when I came up with the Big Boy Router Planer below:

I just happened to have two 4”x4” metal tubes that are each 14 1/2’ long to use as my runners. I clamped them to my mobile table, and then had to figure out how I was going to raise and lower them to accommodate the router sled. It didn’t take me too long to realize raising and lowering these two runners wasn’t going to be practical (too heavy and cumbersome). So, I decided I would “raise” the piece 3/4” every time I used up the 3/4” depth of cut of my router by putting a 3/4” MDF shelf under the piece to raise it up to the needed height (max number of shelves I ever had to use was three, and the weight of the cottonwood slab kept it in place without clamping – even during routing).

That’s about it. This system works great. I can plane a slab up to 14’ long by 40” wide (I could do wider if I were to make a longer router sled – just don’t see the need to go that route just yet. Besides, I’m getting too old to keep stretching that far over the table anyway).

Thanks for looking.
TZH

The first modification: I was always frustrated with how long it took to measure the height at which to set the cross members of the planer using my square in a slotted 2×4. Well, I finally came up with a solution so simple even I was amazed (not the brightest bulb in the pack I guess). Anyway, here it is:

Basically, it consists of one 3/4” pipe over which a 1” diameter stop collar and a series of 1” diameter pipe connectors are piled up on top of each other to give a simple measurement. The router I use has a 3/4” depth of cut, so every time I reach that depth, I just remove a stop collar (about 3/4” thickness) and I’m back to cutting depth. When I get to a pipe connector, I just remove it and substitute two stop collars which leaves me with about 1/2” cutting depth before I can take out the first of the two stop collars. Hope this all makes sense. For anyone out there using this type system, flat washers or large enough nuts would also work.

Second modification: For width of planing, I was always struggling with the “wishy-washy” aspect of the sled my router rode in. It sometimes even caused the router to “run” if I wasn’t quite vigilant enough (after a whole bunch of repeated passes, it gets to a point where the attention span isn’t necessarily what it should be). So, I replaced the “fixed” stops on the sled with a couple of simple homegrown “clamps”. Here they are:

The “clamps” consist of two pieces of trex stiles I had left over from a deck project cut to the width of my router base, drilled through the center of each with a half inch forstner bit and held together by one 6” bolt with a wing nut. Tightening down causes the center of the trex to flex together causing the ends to clamp down on the sled angle iron runners and holding them very solidly exactly where I want them. An added benefit of using this type of clamping system is that I can now adjust the width of a pass I can make based on the width of the piece I’m working on.

And that brings me to the third, and final, modification (probably the best one of all as far as I’m concerned). If you take a look at the two photos showing the clamping system, you should also see wheels on their sides. These wheels allow me to move the sled easily in small increments for each pass of the router. I had originally thought I’d use ball bearings of some kind for this purpose, but decided I needed to use what I had on hand (finances, you know), and decided wheels turned sideways should work just fine. Well, they exceeded my expectations. The fact the sled rides on the two runners gives it enough drag resistance so that the sled stays in place while I make the pass. But the wheels on both ends of the sled allow me to use my hands and my body to move the sled over just enough to make the next pass. Works for me. Hope it works for someone else, too.

Thanks for looking.
TZH

At this point I decided to get more “radical” in my design approach. I removed two of the cross rails (found out through experience that I didn’t need them anyway). Then I took the corner poles out of the flanges and put a “sleeve” on the side of my table for the corner poles to slide into (see photo below). Electrical conduit clamps work great for attaching the sleeves.

This design also allowed me to adjust the height of the router sled in two ways:

1. The corner poles were now adjustable up and down by sliding them up and down in the sleeve. The stop collar you see in the photos just at table level can then be used to hold the corner pole securely in place.

2. Because the stop collars in my earlier designs were so hard to get positioned and secured properly, I decided I had to try something different for the rails the router sled rode on. That’s when it hit me that pipe clamps have a self locking base plate that would be perfect for this type of application. Voila! Why didn’t I think of this earlier? I still need to buy two more pipe clamps to put on the back two poles.

The beauty of this design is that now I have a method that allows me to easily move the cross rails up and down, plus it serves a “dual purpose” that gives me 48” pipe clamps when I need them, as well.

As you can see by the height of the two stumps shown in the photos, this jig allows planing of sizable pieces. In fact, any piece up to a height of 40” can be done with relative ease. I’ve done sofa and coffee table bases/pedestals with this jig with close to perfectly parallel tops and bottoms. I can hardly wait to try it on a lamp base, too!

The square in the photo below is what I use to measure where to set the pipe clamps to get them the same height on all four corners. I set the sled as close to the top of the piece I’m working on as I can, and then I micro adjust each corner using measurements on the square to get it close to perfect.

The trick for getting the top and bottom of the piece(s) parallel is to shim them prior to the first planing effort in order to get everything as straight as possible and to minimize the amount needing to be planed off (see photo below). Cardboard pieces, thin plastic, or other suitable material works well as shims.

Once the piece is shimmed, the procedure is simple:

1. For these two stumps I had to fasten them to each other because they were intended to become the legs for a simple bench I was making and these legs had to be exactly the same height. As you can see in the photo below, I fastened them together by lag screwing a 2×4 onto each stump to help prevent movement.

2. The next step is to secure the piece to the table (I use ratchet tie downs most of the time, but I’ve also used bungees which are not as secure). In the photo below, I used only one tie down, but I would advise using two most of the time for this type of work, if possible.

3. Once the top is planed down evenly, it is a simple matter to flip the piece over (it won’t even need to be shimmed for this next step), remove the 2×4 and refasten it at the bottom as before, secure the piece using the tie down(s) as before, and plane away. The result looks like this:

!

Here’s a photo of the rough bench prior to finishing.

Next up – Version 2.0 (for the really BIG pieces!)

Because I’d made the router sled larger in order to accommodate larger pieces, I now needed to design something bigger for the sled to ride on. That’s when I came up with the idea of using longer piping for the end poles and cross rails (instead of the 12” pipes and the plywood cross rails shown in my first design). The photo below shows my first attempt (my “beta” version) at this new design.

As you can see, this first “beta” version looked pretty wierd. I thought if I made it triangular in shape, I could manipulate the widths of the slabs I worked on while still allowing me to work on thicker pieces, as well. I didn’t like this one at all because even with my newer sled design (not shown in these photos) that used angle iron as the runners, I couldn’t keep the sled on the rails when I needed to. So, I came up with the following version, Version 1.2:

This one worked much better than the triangular configuration. The slab in the photo started out at about 8” thick and was planed down using this version to a thickness of about 5”.

With this design, I found that having the extra height afforded by the 48” corner posts was a real plus, but adjusting the height was really hard to do to get it straight and level on all four sides because of the cross rails. The stop collars (see below) had to be in almost perfect alignment in order to get the most exact cut/plane with the router, and that was very hard to do with the cross rails in place. Plus, the flanges the corner poles went into weren’t the best quality, so the poles went cattywampus in different directions which made it that much more difficult to get the height adjustment correct.

It’s not that it couldn’t be done. Rather, it was just more difficult, frustrating, and time consuming to get the height exact. So, once again it was back to the drawing board.

Next time – Version 1.2a.

Now here was a design I really took a liking to right away. This one allowed me to plane much larger pieces without fear of slipping off the edges of the runners because the router moves within the confines of the angle iron glides.

The angle iron glides also allowed the router to slide back and forth (gotta use beeswax on a regular basis to grease the skids, so to speak) and the edges of the iron glides also keep it straighter and truer when planing. The sled was made just wide enough to accommodate the width of the router baseplate, so there is virtually no chance the router will slip out when planing.

However, this process is time consuming and hard on the back if the piece is very large or the angle makes for a long reach. To address this issue, I found working on half the piece at a time, and then switching to the other half when done with the first half, works very well (see photo below). I also found that a larger router works a lot better than the smaller ones (a 1/2” shank router straight bit that cuts a larger diameter is definitely a plus, too). Anyway, this improved design router planer was a lot closer to what I needed than anything I’d found so far.

The photo above shows just one example of a large slab being planed. This piece is almost 3’ at its widest point. It started out over 5” thick and the “wings” on it were so warped, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to save it. The photo below shows this slab as a coffee table top that I’ve gotten a lot of drooling over, but so far I haven’t had a buyer for it.

Next up – Version 1.2.

The results of my search were mixed. The very first option I found, and the one I decided to use as my baseline, was a design for a router planer in one of my old WOOD magazines (April/May 2005):

While the design in this issue was excellent for thinner pieces, I needed something that would also be height adjustable because many of the pieces I was working with were a lot more than 2” thick. So, I designed a small router planer using pipes and plywood height adjustors based loosely on the Wood maganzine design.

VERSION 1.0

This first router sled I designed used aluminum tracks with a clear plexiglass bottom (see photos below). The movement of the router back and forth over the piece was controlled by using the router handles rather than separate handles as in the design in WOOD. Width adjustment was made by opening the table the router planer was mounted on (width adjustment on this table was minimal, so I knew I’d need to come up with something bigger sooner or later).

The concept worked great! The sled needed some work, however. With this design, the router sled was too “wishy-washy” in its movement back and forth, and there was too much of a chance that it would slip off the plywood cross rails if I got careless and wasn’t watching what I was doing close enough. As a result, I went to a “track” sled:

This version worked much better than the first one, but it was still too small to handle the larger slabs I wanted to plane to a flat surface. So, back to the drawing board. Next up – Version 1.1.