Musings

Flattening the Planing Beam – Euclidian Postulates to the Rescue!

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It’s been two years since I installed the 8-foot long southern yellow pine 8″x10″ planing beam in the shop, and it has turned out to be my favorite work station.

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Occasionally an itinerant minstrel stops by to admire it, and if they are reasonably pleasant I even let them give it a test drive.

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For the most part it has stayed stable, but this week I noticed a bit of a crown on the top — of course, worst at the business end of the beam! — so I decided to address it forthrightly.  The timber itself is eight years old — I bought a stack of green SYP timbers like it when I bought the barn thinking I might need them for repairs, but didn’t — so I expect it will still move a bit for another ten or twelve years.

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Flattening the beam is truly a straightforward exercise that made me think of my high school math teacher Mr. Fisk, who was pleasantly rigorous in drilling us with Geometry Postulates and Theorems, and many a time one has popped into my head just when I needed it.

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Well, one of the most important of the Postulates for woodworkers is the notion that any two intersecting lines establish a plane.  What this means in practice is that if you address any surface with a hand plane, first at 45-degrees to the left, then 45-degrees to the right, when the two patterns meet and cover the entire face you have established a planar surface.

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So I did that with a scrub plane, then finished off the surface with a toothing plane to give it a little texture while keeping it flat.  At some point I will deal with the front surface, which is now almost certainly not perfectly square to the top.  But not this week.

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Up next will be getting some help in bringing the 14-foot southern yellow pine 10″x 10″ up from the basement to make a really spectacular planing beam. Maybe next month.