Skill Share: Table Top/Large Board Flattening w/ a router

Hey Gang,

Just wanted to share with you a success story. I made my workbench a couple years ago, but always suffered from a crummy table top. It wasn’t level, was bumpy, and I got paint all over it.

Well, a couple weeks back Lumberjock fave Marc Spagnuolo, The Wood Whisperer, posted a video on very simple way of leveling table top and large boards.

http://lumberjocks.com/thewoodwhisperer/blog/30159

Since this had been something on my mind for a while I decided to try it out. Here are my results.

Here are almost all the tools I used to do the job. My little helper was there to assist in the cleanup.

End shot of a level on the table top.

This is the 1.5” bottom cutting bit I used to do the job.

And this is the very primitive track I built to guide the router. I do not have a picture of the sacrificial rails I used to hold the router guide. If your curious, look at Marc’s blog and video and you’ll understand.

A couple of thoughts now that I am done…

Definitely add extra clamps besides the end ones. I had to go over the table twice because I left a center clamp off and the boards bowed ever so slightly

I would add some small blocks to the underside of the router track, at the very ends, to keep the track from coming off the guide rails as you push and pull the router back and forth. I gouged my tabletop in a couple of places when the guide fell off the rails. Fortunately this only happened a couple times.

I used my hand planes much more than Marc does in his video. I also used my belt and random orbital sanders.

I was pleasantly surprised with the result. DON’T mess up like me and forget you put some nail in the top of your table. ack! Nasty to see the sparks, but fortunately they didn’t mess up my bit.

I am going to try this technique again in the future on my antique pine to flatten them. Takes a little bit of time to set up, but I really like the results.

I hope this help someone in the future!

Milo

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