Pics of your milled products

[muttley9050]

Ah yes I see it now! Didn't look that closely before! I presume it's easier to join thicker boards? My board is 2foot wide but only an inch thick, as I'm just doing this as a hobby will it be harder to join it back together if I cut in half to be planed?

Best not to cut it if you can in my opinion. Where in the country are you.

[Coletti]

This looks awesome! Going to try and make a coffee table myself in the next couple of weeks. How did you get the top nice and smooth/flat? I haven't got access to a large planer/thicknesser.
 
Cheers, James.

A good electric planer, plenty of sanding and lots of patients. It can be done, just takes time. I'm not saying that you'll get it perfect but it'll be close enough.

[wisewood]

A good electric planer, plenty of sanding and lots of patients. It can be done, just takes time. I'm not saying that you'll get it perfect but it'll be close enough.

It can be trued up using a plunge router with a biggish flat bottom bit. Google router sled [emoji106]

[peckerwood2016]

Elm breakfast bar with elm and box section steel frames stools

[jamesd]

55 minutes ago, Coletti said:

7 hours ago, jamesd said:

This looks awesome! Going to try and make a coffee table myself in the next couple of weeks. How did you get the top nice and smooth/flat? I haven't got access to a large planer/thicknesser.
 
Cheers, James.

A good electric planer, plenty of sanding and lots of patients. It can be done, just takes time. I'm not saying that you'll get it perfect but it'll be close enough.

I thought about a decent belt sander?

[jamesd]

1 hour ago, muttley9050 said:

1 hour ago, jamesd said:

Ah yes I see it now! Didn't look that closely before! I presume it's easier to join thicker boards? My board is 2foot wide but only an inch thick, as I'm just doing this as a hobby will it be harder to join it back together if I cut in half to be planed?

Best not to cut it if you can in my opinion. Where in the country are you.

Basingstoke, Hampshire.

[muttley9050]

Basingstoke, Hampshire.

If I didn't have a router if try and find a joinery shop to flatten it for me. A friend of mine would put that through his sander for me for £20.

[jamesd]

27 minutes ago, muttley9050 said:

If I didn't have a router if try and find a joinery shop to flatten it for me. A friend of mine would put that through his sander for me for £20.

Unfortunately the only guys i know don't have a big enough planer or one of those big drum sanders...

[Jamespepperpot]

This looks awesome! Going to try and make a coffee table myself in the next couple of weeks. How did you get the top nice and smooth/flat? I haven't got access to a large planer/thicknesser.
 
Cheers, James.

Thanks, like James said it's three boards joined together as I didn't have a wide enough board to make it out of one piece. It was the clients idea but it turned out ok, the glue line isn't perfect and it can look strange joining wide boards of burry oak.

I use a router sled set up on wider boards to flatten them. I often join boards together as they can be more stable than single wider boards because the grain direction faces different ways and means as the boards move seasonally they don't all move the same way. Heres a kitchen island I made last week out of three boards joined together. They were all flattened with a router sled then the edges were done on my planer.

[Jamespepperpot]

Heres a time-lapse of my router sled