I bought a trailer full of oak to make baseboards out of.
The first thing I needed to do is make sure I have a straight edge
on all of them on my jointer.
Some of the boards were too long for my jointer
but I still managed to get them straightened out.
Now I need to rip those boards all to widths of my baseboards
and for that I figured it would be useful
to have some sort of a power feeder so I mounted this
roller skate wheel on the shaft, on the drill.
And I jigged this thing up here,
and then another thing here to press down on it
and hopefully that will work as a power feeder.
Now testing it with an actual cut.
My power feeder doesn't quite work perfectly,
it's more of a power assisted hold down,
but at that it makes life a lot easier already.
Also the way I had it jigged up, I couldn't quite use it
on the widest boards I had but that's okay,
there's only a few of those.
The boards were up-saw and varied quite a lot in thickness,
so the next step was to plane them all repeatedly.
And making sure the planer always has at least one board
going through it so I can avoid the snipe
at the start of the board.
Well, I knew these dryer hoses were not meant
for that sort of thing. Planing quite this much material,
just kind of put on hole in it, but I will cut this part off
and Ill try it again, see if it ruins again.
Maybe if I put another straight piece here,
the shavings won't be flying quite so fast anymore
and it's not going to destroy the hose as quickly.
And with that change made, the flimsy dryer hose
held up just fine for the rest of the planing.
Now if some of those boards were not new
and had some screw holes to fill in so here I am making some plugs
to fill those with.
Before making the final pass through the thickness planer,
I went through all the boards to make sure I had at least
one good side and also figure out which side is going to get
the final planing pass.
Here's what the plugs look like. Most of them are pretty good.
It's full to about here now. I should empty that.
One of the rare pieces of useful advice I've gotten
out of a YouTube comment is to use magnets to hold the bag up
while putting it back on.
I figure this sort of profile would look nice on the baseboards
and I can cut that with a raised panel router bit
on this improvised router table. But before a cut these,
I figure it would help to cut away much of this material
on the table saw. I have a thin curved ripping blade
in here and I've got that tilted
to take away much of the excess material
and to help me feed it through, I improved my improvised
feeder gadget and now it even has a knob
for adjusting how much downward pressure I've got.
Still powered with a drill,
still using a roller skate wheel.
Wow. That actually works.
I got my power feeder jigged up on the router table
plus two little roller skate bearings
to help press the wood against a fence
so let's see how that goes.
So I need some custom hose flange to fit on here
and if I had a 3D printer, I could design that
and print that out and spend a day at it.
Fortunately, I don't have a 3D printer,
so I just used a piece of 4x4 beam,
cut a hole in it with a bandsaw, then cut these two sides
flat to fit
up against the rotor, like this.
Had to go from a three inch to four inch
so I just used a piece of towel as a hose adapter
because this is going to my big dust collector.
Running now. Plenty of suction.
Stalled it.
Problem with this drill is if you hold the trigger steady,
for about five minutes, it eventually stops,
and then you have to let go of the trigger and restart it.
Looked like I'm clearing the dust quite successfully,
I'm drawing about 700 watts with the router
but it's also running at it's lowest speed of 10,000 R.P.M.
so I really shouldn't push it,
I don't want to burn out this router.
With so much air getting sucked through the router,
it wasn't even getting warm to the touch.
Holy crap! That is loud.
Now I think what would be nice is to add just a little bit
of a round over right here and normally I just do that
with a hand plane, but with quite that much material,
I think I'll set up to cut that with a router.
And now making a small cut, I was able to bump up the R.P.M.
and the feed rate by a lot.
Here's a round over I just added and to make sure the top edge
stays flat against the wall, even if it's uneven,
I'm adding a hollow cove cut on the back
and I'm doing that on the table saw.
Going sideways across the blade and once again
with a power feeder. I set the blade
at a 45 degree angle so as the wood comes in like this,
the top of the teeth do the cutting instead of the sides
because that works so much better.
It's at times like this it becomes clear to me
that what I've got here is not professional grade equipment.
I just took the belt off of here because once a year
the nut on the back of this pulley it becomes loose
and I need to tighten it. Oh yeah,
and my mini dust collector on here,
that wasn't really meant for production work either
so I had to clean it out a few times during this run.
Just to put it into perspective that cove cut that I did,
with two side by side passes, that filled two buckets
full of sawdust. And just cutting the bevel off
here's the off-cuts from that and ripping the pieces to width,
here's the off-cuts from that.
I'm very happy with how consistent these all came out
and I think that has a lot to do with using a power feeder