I saved a ton of wood (mainly lathe) when remodeling my house and finally decided to get started on doing something with it. My first issue came last week when I tried to run both my planer and wet/dry vac on the same circuit. I kept blowing it. So on Friday, I ran a new 20 amp circuit to right above the planer. After that, things ran smoothly.

Today, I went beneath my back porch and pulled out some lathe. There’s basically a pile about 10’x6′ in area and almost as tall as me of wood out there. So I hardly made a dent in it.

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The plan was to plane both sides of each board and then glue a bunch together to make bigger boards.

This is after about 1 1/2 hours of planing. I also separated the wood by length because I thought it would make it easier to glue together.

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Next I used a paint brush to paint glue along each board and then stick boards together. The painting took a while and I should probably find a faster way to glue them up. But this did work fine. I clamped the boards together for a couple of hours to let them dry.

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Lastly, I unclamped the boards and ran them through the planer again to smooth out the edges. It took a few passes, but it turned out ok. This is about a 4′ long board by about 5″ or so.

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I only made this one board because I don’t own enough clamps to make all the other boards. So I have enough wood planed to make a few more boards. Without counting the drying time, everything today took me around two hours. I’ll definitely go faster in the future because I got more comfortable with the planer as I went along.

My only other concern is that I don’t think the blades on the planer will last that long. I know that I can change the blades, but I have a lot of wood to plane and I don’t want to be spending $80 just to make four boards. So I’ve been looking into a Shelix planer head to replace the blades. They’re crazy expensive, like $500. But they supposedly last much, much longer than the blades. I’d have ordered it already, but I watched a couple youtube videos of people installing this cutter and it looks really complicated. I’d be willing to pay someone to install it for me, but I don’t know that I could find someone to do it. Guess for now I’ll just keep planing with what I have and then look into the new head when the blades get dull.