LESSON LEARNED!
Relearning the basics at any stage in life can sometimes prove to be a challenge. Woodworking skills are no different & rising to those challenges are what help us learn, change & grow – it’s a choice!
The picture in this post is from a while back, but as a woodworker the message is timeless.
It had been years since I used a surface planer. Perhaps more than a decade or two.
For those reading that may not know what a surface planer is, it’s a power tool used to reduce the thickness of a piece of wood. It does this by ‘roller-ing’ it into a spinning cylindrical blade which slices off a thin thin layer of wood from the top surface. This is generally done to take off an undesired layer of the wood’s surface OR to get a piece of wood milled to the correct thickness for a particular project.
Anyhow…the above picture is referred to as “wood snipe”. This occurs when the wood is being rolled out of the machine (under it’s own power) but there isn’t a level support tray or output table for the wood to push onto. The large internal rollers on the surface planer are pushing the wood down which causes it to jump up after it leaves contact with the initial first roller.
Essentially it’s harmless. But it definitely makes a commotion of noise. Also, if the wood you’re planing is a critical piece already near the desired thickness, well…it’s ruined. Luckily this was practice oak for a project. Nothing critical as I was in the “relearning phase” of getting back into woodworking.
I think the lesson here was twofold…
One…that after 20 some odd years of being away from formal finish woodworking it took about 5 minutes of ‘muscle memory’ to comeback, kick in and make me say “oh yea…I need really level infeed and outfeed tables on this thing for good results”.
Two…always be willing to make mistakes, own the mistakes and LEARN from the mistakes. The art of woodworking is exactly that…an art, a practice – not perfection with every endeavor.