Does it WORK__ __ Woodworking Experiment.

Here's the problem, planer chatter. When I'm running thin strips of wood through my thickness planer, and it hits that first feed roller and pops a little wheelie, and the cutter block comes up and hits it, and it starts cracking and popping and hissing like an old Volkswagen Scirocco, you end up with this, a mulch-y mangled mess. Now, one solution to this problem is to make a planer sled out of MDF, melamine, or plywood. Use double stick tape, or even CA glue. Stick that lead edge down, and even the trailing edge a little bit, and then run the whole thing through. And I've actually got a piece down to less than a 16th of an inch, three 64ths, just over a millimeter, using that method. So it's a fantastic solution, if you're only running a few pieces. But when I built this table base, I needed about 60 of these. So it's not really an efficient way to do the process. So to combat that, I built this, a giant Baltic birch plywood box with holes in the top, a four inch dust collection port at the end, with the hopes of pulling air through here and creating a vacuum table to keep that material flat down on this as it passes the feed roll and the cutter block, and then continues on through, chatter, and tear out free. So, the question is, does it work? Let's find out. First up, let's cut down some half inch Baltic birch plywood at the table saw. This is just some scrap that I had laying around. And then over at the miter saw, can cut the top and bottom to length, and then cut those sides to length as well. Over at the table saw, I neglected to cut a few pieces for the end. So I'll rip those down to width, introduce them to the other stack of parts, and then head over to the bench where Jerry anxiously awaits. Get these sorted out. If I can get these kind of laid out. Oh, goodbye, Jerry. And since this was pre-finished plywood, I'm just using a little sandpaper here to remove said coating, so I get better adhesion when I throw some glue on there. With that bead of glue firmly in place, let's use the brad nailer to kind of tack everything. And if you're wondering how I cut that four inch dust port hole on the end, I recently put out a video on my channel on how to drill any size hole where I used this exact example to show you. Now, I'm only gluing on the bottom, not the top. Because the top, I'm gonna put some holes in. I wanna be able to remove that in case any alterations need to be made. Oh, little Jerry. What a softy, albeit a lazy softy. And because I like to overbuild the heck out of things, I popped in some screws on all sides and on the bottom to secure everything nice and tight. Now we need to drill all of our holes in the top. You ready, Jer? So to be honest, I'm not really sure how many holes will be too much suction versus not enough suction. If you have too much suction and it's pulling that board down onto this jig too much, it's gonna create too much resistance and those feed rollers are gonna have a difficult time pulling that material through and maybe even not pull it and it just slips on it. So I'm gonna err on the side of too few holes first and then run a few test pieces through the planer and see how it works. So I'm gonna lay out a grid pattern here and then over to the drill press and make some Swiss cheese. Because I can't just randomly throw holes everywhere, my OCD requires that I lay out a grid using equal space divider to make sure they are all equally spaced, lay out some lines in both directions and head over to the drill press and figure out what drill bit size to use. All right, so I'll go with the 10 millimeter and see how that works. And then if I need more suction, I can come back and split the distance on all these holes with a smaller bit maybe just to kind of break it up. Yeah, what the heck? What do you got to lose besides a piece of plywood? So if you need to use the restroom, now might be a good time because I got to drill a bunch of holes and this could get pretty boring. And a quick sanding to remove those unsightly lines before we assemble this thing. You guys wanna hear something weird? This drill, it smells like oregano and BO. Must be the Sopranos edition. It's just weird. Yowza. All right. Get, get. These are not Tic Tacs. Smell it, Jared. Smell it. Right? BO and oregano? It's not me. It's the drill. Telling me. Dust collection port in here. Perfect. I also attached a little cleat on the back to hook on the bed of the planer table. That way the whole thing doesn't go flying through when I run stock through it. Goodbye, Lola. So just got to rig up some kind of dust collection because I need something that goes into here that's pulling the chips out as we plane them and then split off into a Y that pulls air through these holes that will keep our work piece flat against the surface so it doesn't get sucked up. I don't know. To be honest, it may not work at all. It may... Oh man, that piece of fuzz is gonna drive you nuts. Counteract each other and the whole thing explodes. But I think it's worth a try. So now let's rigamarole something up here. All right, here's the setup. So I stole this Y fitting off of my bandsaw. So the blue hose is where it goes all the way back to the dust collector. It Ys off there into the top of the planer head. We'll suck out all the chips. And then the second Y comes down and around and connects with the mag port as well into the vacuum box. All right, so these strips of walnut I had laying around, they were about 3 16ths of an inch thin already. So we're just gonna take them down as low as we can go. And also bear in mind without using an auxiliary sled, that is the thinnest that my planer will go. So it took that down pretty thin. I'm gonna grab the calipers and see. But that was there before and it pretty much smoothed out what was there. I don't know if that just happened or not. I heard a clink, clink, clink. So that may have been it. So let's see how thin we actually are able to get. So less than an eighth of an inch. And for you metric people, let's see. 2.98 millimeters. Well, I ran a couple more pieces through and they were a complete disaster getting shredded. So I'm taping off some holes to try to increase suction towards the middle and the front of the planer box. And this did not go well. That was some serious crunch and munch. Got hungry, hungry hippos in there. And for some reason, I thought it was a good idea to tape off some holes on the edges and then run it through again. Sweet, fancy Moses, look at that tear out. All right, time for plan B, no, C. Wait, is this D? E. So I think these small holes are restricting airflow. It's like trying to suck through a straw. So there's two options. I can make them bigger or I can put more. What I decided to do instead was put an angled divider inside the vacuum box to compartmentalize the air and angle it towards the dust collection port. Since I really didn't need air flowing through the entire box, hopefully this would localize and centralize it exactly where I needed it, as well as actually increase the airflow. Well, this is what I thought anyway. So with the new air ramp all nice and tidy inside, I could take the top and drill some additional holes, as I mentioned before, making those a little bit bigger and then reattach the lid to give this thing another go. Good grief. All right, so that did not work. What I think I'm gonna do now, instead of running air to both the dust collection on top and the vacuum table, I switch this off and I'm just gonna run air to the vacuum table and see if we can put all that CFM right here and see what happens. Right off the bat, it's mincemeat. This time I'll hold the back up and push the front down to keep it flat. Well, that was quick feedback. Now this is difficult to show on camera here, but this right here is my cutter block. These are my knives, it's in a spiral pattern. So here are just some of the carbide cutters. But when I look straight down, which is right here, I don't have any suction directly below the blade. These are actually blocked off because of the angled piece of wood I put in there. So I think one thing to try is actually having suction right before the cutter head as well as directly under it. So I'm gonna modify this box and see if that makes a difference. So I removed the holy lid, moved that center divider back, swapped out my ramp for a longer ramp, secured that, put the top back on and headed back to the planer to try again. Okay, that sounds promising. All right, I think I flew a little too close to the sun on that one, tried to go too thin. That's just over two millimeters. That means it went down to 330 seconds before breaking up. And that's way better than it was, interesting. So here's the whole pattern I decided on for no other reason than it looks symmetrical. But the middle of the cutter head is right about here. So I'm hoping that as it comes, it pulls it down before it goes into the cutter head. And then while it's being cut, it stays down flat and then transitions through. I taped off the end three holes because I don't think I need any suction there. So we'll try this. Anybody need any walnut mulch? This is why companies spend so much money on research and development. Because it's a pain in the tookus. Hey, at least that piece of lint is gone. Out of sheer chance, I said, let me try flipping this thing around so that the suction is on the in-feed side. And that actually seemed to work better. The theory, I guess, is right from the get-go, I have my piece sucked down to the table and then it passes the cutter head. And as it gets past there, suction releases, but it's still holding the material down here as it goes through. So the only problem with that is the center of my cutter head now is right in between two sets of holes. I'd really like holes right beneath the cutter head, making sure that lead edge is sucked right down when that first cutter hits it. So I'm gonna drill a couple more holes. Try it again. Okay, I wanna say something, but I don't wanna jinx it. Oh, come on. All right, so I was pretty much ready to call it quits after that. But I just wanted to sleep on it one more night just to make sure there wasn't something obvious that I was missing. And there kind of was. All right, so I was just running a few test pieces through there and I noticed a major problem. I was noticing some snipe on both ends of the piece. And I can tell you, this machine, I never get sniped. So right there, I was like, something is amiss. So I put a flashlight here and ran another test piece through. And as I peered through, I could see the second this thing got in touch with that first speed roller and the cutter head, the entire table of that vacuum box flexed down. So that cutter head just dug deep into this. And then as it passed over, it did the same thing. So this is half inch thick Baltic birch plywood. Even going to three quarters, I'm not sure that's gonna be enough. Let me see if I can get the camera in here and show you exactly what's happening. All right, so I actually slowed this video down. You can see right there, it drops right there, right there. The whole bed drops. Now my planer bed sits on a giant post that's about four inches in diameter and it is completely locked down. So I don't think it's that that's flexing, but I guess it is possible. Somehow, whether the box is coming down and the sides are bulging out, I'm not sure. But either way, it's a no good. And I want you to watch right at the end here where that box pops right back up after the wood goes through. All right, so there was a glimmer of promise at the end there by flipping this around and having the suction at the lead edge rather than at the trailing edge. This piece really, I think you can chalk up to a huge knot there and there, which has turned this to mulch, it got so thin. And you might be yelling at your phone right now, I can't believe you didn't try this, try that. Put a blast gate here and put a vent hole there and compartmentalize this. All those things may work. Right now, I'm gonna have to chalk this up as a fail. So unfortunately, this case is closed pending further investigation. So ultimately, the best method with my machine is what I mentioned at the beginning was to use a flat piece of sheet material, use double-sided tape and run it through the planer. Now, if you wanna watch the video where I actually made some bent laminations out of 60 of these strips, I'll put a card for that right here if you wanna go check it out. And I hope this wasn't too disappointing, but not every experiment is a success in here. So I'm gonna put my tail between my legs and go in and cry on Jerry's shoulder.