The other legs were then passed through with each having a different amount of material removed. I set the planer height to just allow the largest Beech leg in and fed in the timber with the newly flat edge facing down. This flat edge could now be used on the planer to remove material from the opposite top edge and level that out. It was easy to tell once the first face was flat as all the saw marks and rough texture was no longer visible, replaced by a bright clean face with no marks or blemishes. To begin I passed one face edge from each piece of Beech over my jointer to smooth it out. I used the Beech first as these would eventually become the legs so made sense to do them altogether so they were of equal size. The frame materials consisted of 4 similar lengths of Beech around 60mm square and two chunky beams of Oak offcut about a meter in length. To get it in a useable condition I used my jointer and planer in combination to level each face and get the thicknesses I required. However it was in no way ready to use as its warped and twisted from years of storage. To build the frame which my top will sit on I have used a mix of Beech and Oak, mainly because its what I had lying around. Because the bottom side is now flat I didn't need any shims to level it, just blocks to hold it securely as the slabs not heavy enough on its own to stay in place.Īnother few passes over this side with the router and the slab is level ready to use and the grain has really come out from the dark, dirty lump I started with.
The slab could now be flipped and the process repeated on the other side. At this stage I'm not too worried about going any finer as I'll finish the slab later. Once I had gone over the whole slab once there were still low areas where the router couldn't reach so I increased the depth of the cut and repeated the process to get down to these low areas and further level the slab.Īfter everything is levelled and looks flat there were tool markings from the router, which using my orbital sander I sanded out using 80 grit discs.
( in some places the router may not be set deep enough to cut as the slab is uneven by nature but these areas will be addressed on the next pass). With the routers depth set to remove no more than 5mm at a time, (so its easier and safer no chance of sticking or tearing) I used a back and forth motion across the surface of the slab to cut away material, moving along the slab slightly left to right after every pass. Once it was secure I placed my sled over the slab spanning from rail to rail and placed the router on top. If it does rock there's a chance that the router will cut too deep in some places and I'll have to remove a lot more material than I want to. Now to level the slab I placed it in my sled setup on the bench top, using small pieces of scrap timber and shims to try get it as level as possible and prevent it from rocking and moving when cutting with the router. If you want to flatten large pieces of wood however then it is a very good solution for those of us that don't have industrial size planers and sanders. It works for me but is by no means perfect and I've seen much better examples on here that other people have made.
I then have an old steel CD rack frame as the sled that my router sits on with two guide rails either side to stop it coming off. I won't go in to too much detail about my sled but its basically two lengths of 2" x 3" running parallel to one another, screwed to my bench, with enough room between for the slab.
The easiest way to do this was to use my router with a flat cutting bit in, running it over the surface of the slab using my homemade router sled. My first job on this table was to level and flatten my newly acquired piece of Cherry.
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