Planing question - planing over inlay

I have planed inlay that ran with the grain, and it worked fine, however I would not attempt to plane since your inlays are cross grain. Belt sand to get it close. Then switch to a random orbital sander. This will work just fine, with no risk of destroying your inlay.

-- Willie, Washington "If You Choose Not To Decide, You Still Have Made a Choice" - Rush

Pintodeluxe’s response would be the way to do it to avoid any chance of ruining the inlay but I’ve ran boards with inlays through my planer without any problems also. I don’t know what kind of knives you have in your planer but I have a spiral cutter head. The trick is to make sure the inlays aren’t standing proud of the main board by very much to begin with and I just take light passes, Once they are even, there isn’t much to worry about. Because the inlays are sandwiched in the notches, you eliminate the chance of tear out. Tear out would be most likely to happen at an exposed end which wouldn’t be present in what you want to do.

Sanding will result in some of the walnut dust bleeding on to the lighter wood. I think a card scraper would be the best method.

-- Good judgement comes from experience and experience comes from poor judgement.

I’ve started gluing the inlays into place, I am going to try to flatten them as close as possible to the rest of the board using a sharp chisel and then take very light passes on the planer and see what happens. I’ve got a dewalt with standard blades, not spiral. I do have spiral in my jointer.

I will need to figure out what to do about the side of the piece, where the small end grain cross section of the walnut needs to be flush with the maple. What do you think would happen if I tried to trim that side with the jointer?

Maybe I’ll make a test piece with a single inlay and see what happens on both machines.

I have jigged routers to flush trim inlay and dowels, then hit it with the orbital sander and done. Make a simple base for the router with a channel cut in it.

If anyone is curious, the planer did the job. I did make up a test piece first to see what would happen. On both the tester and the project, I used a chisel to try to get the surface as flush as possible before planing.

I also ran the edge through the jointer afterward to clean up that edge. The final project page is here.

Card scraper…....

-- Just a man with his chisel.........