Gluing up Boards..What order

Rush,

When edge gluing boards I rough plane to about 1/4 inch over sized thickness, then after the glue dries flatten everything to final thickness using hand planes.

Rat

-- I love the smell of sawdust in the morning....

I usually plane before gluing, but I also own a wide drum sander and good hand planes.

If the glue up won’t fit in your planer, or if the wood is prone to chipping, you don’t have a choice. Often, a glued panel will have one or more boards that has reversed grain to the others. This complicates machine planing.

I usually use curved cauls, or slots with biscuits or splines, for alignment during the glue-up. I’ve also done it in stages. Say… 2 boards each into one, then attaching the 2 pairs into a 4 or 5 board glue-up. I’ll usually start with boards thicker than I need, to allow for final surfacing.

One thing to keep in mind is that top or panel thickness is rarely a precision measurement. It often doesn’t matter in the end if the thickness is 3/4”. 13/16”, or 11/16”... As long as the glued up surface is FLAT (smooth does not equal FLAT), the wood is well selected, and the joined edges are seamless, you’ll have a great looking glue-up. In the case of a panel, thickness variations are also easily hidden as one side is often not visible.

Lots of folks who purchase s4s wood are afraid to take too much off when final surfacing, leaving a surface that is less than flat. This is much more noticeable to the untrained eye, even if the person can’t put a finger on what doesn’t look “right”, than a slightly thinner, but well flattened, top or panel.

Craftspeople of the past (and some modern factories) often used rounded edge or chamfered boards as a design feature. This also hides mismatches between boards.

-- - Please help keep Lumberjocks an enjoyable escape by refusing to participate in political discussions. Simply spit out the bait and ignore the thread...

That would depend largely on the size of your planer but you need to do some planing before glue-up, in my opinion, to get an idea of the grain and coloration of the boards. I generally plane 4/4 stock to about 15/16 and glue-up the panels. If they will fit through my 13” planer then I use a card scraper to remove the glue residue and then plane the panel to its final thickness. But do not rely on the planer to remove hardened glue. This is a receipe for nicked planer blades.

If the finshed panel will not go through the planer then you really do not have an option other than planing close to the final thickness, gluing up the boards and then removing the glue residues. Scraping and sanding will remove enough material to get the panel to the desired thickness. A wide belt sander would be ideal to have for this situation.

-- With God's help all things are possible- even woodworking. Woodworking is not just a hobby, it is an (expletive deleted) expensive hobby.

I when edge gluing say 4 boards do the out side 2 then the inside 2 plane both close to final thickness
then glue the last joint and you only have one seam to worry about

Larry

-- lcurrent ( It's not a mistake till you run out of wood )