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Just watched this great video with some really good advice from great builders and learned (as of this filming) that John Greven doesn't have a thickness sander but instead uses a router on rails setup to thickness. Planing is always an option but was wondering if there are other methods as my home made sander just takes so many passes and isn't that accurate...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IJ8rg6lw44

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As much as I love routers I don't see them as a great way to thickness stock. One possibility to speed up the process is to use a small bench top power planer to get the plates close to the right thickness and carefully glue them up so the plates line up well at the seam. That can reduce the number of passes needed through your drum sander.
This may not be good for crazy grained wood where tearout is a problem but for many woods can work well. The close spacing of the rollers on the small bench top units make them less prone to sucking the wood into the cutterhead and reducing it to a pile of toothpicks.

Some folks use a safety planer in the drill press.



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safe-T-planer can do the job. I used one for my first two guitars to thickness top, back and sides. It is not perfect, and you need to do a lot of follow up work with a cabinet scraper and sandpaper. But it can be done. For back and soundboard you will probably find that the drillpress does not handle the width of the piece. I put the planer in a hand drill and bolted it to a beam which I suspended horizontal above a flat table top. I could then pass wide pieces through to thickness them in multiple passes. It makes a hell of a mess. After a couple of instruments done this way I was very happy to pay out to buy a drum thickness sander. But I do still use the Safe-T-planer to thickness headstocks, like in the photo above.

If you have ever had a thickness sander, it's hard to think of being without one. I realize that the cost is prohibitive, and still remember what it was like to not have one. Scrapers and planes and finally a homemade thickness sander did the job, but I never excelled at using them quickly. Whatever you do, don't buy a Shop Fox 1709 sander, which I doubt you are in the market for anyway, but I'll use your thread to spread my opinion of this tool. I just replaced my 18 year old 24" Sunhill widebelt sander with a new Shop Fox 20" one. Got the Shop Fox just a few days ago after waiting 3 weeks for it to reach Hawaii.We can't get anything here in the islands, so new tools can be an expensive gamble. I'm sometimes naive about products. I figured if they were going to charge me $7,000.00 for the sander, it would be decent product. Wrong! Dangerously fragile tracking system, user unfriendly electronics, Lousy dust collection design, etc.Luckily my old sander was still sitting here waiting for the new owner to pick it up. Had to call him up with a Sorry! Very bad, but there is no life in my shop without a sander. Dealing with Shop Fox to see if I can return the tool, eat $900.00 in shipping, but dig out somewhat from the $7,000.00 cost. Never had to do anything like this. Wonder what my chances are? Probably not good, but I'll know tomorrow I hope.

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These work pretty good. Need to practice sharpening and technique, but inexpensive and there's nothing like a nice vintage tool in your hands

Ed

Is this what you're actually after? Faster and more accurate? I don't think any of the options presented so far meet both of your requirements. Keep an eye on craigslist. I see quality drum sanders on there from time to time, at least where I live. I picked up a 16-32 with in / out tables, a mobile stand and a truckload of pre-cut paper rolls for 75% off retail. You can find a deal with some patience or luck.

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There are really good reasons why most of us use either a wide belt or a drum sander to thickness guitar parts. Sure, you can get the thicknessing job done in other ways, and many people do, but most go the thickness sander route because it makes the most sense, all things considered. Unless you have some very specific reason for wanting to use another method of thicknessing, and you can make that other method work without a huge effort or investment, I would just build or buy a better thickness sander.

I use a thickness planer whenever I can.
For highly figured wood, I use a router sled and clean up with a large sanding block.
For small stuff like headstock veneers and binding, I use an oscillating drum sander with a fence. It is very slow and takes many passes, but gets the job done.
I would never consider getting a thickness sander without having a dust collector system.

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wah
Wah-wah-wah-wah
Wah

Yeah I use the thickness sander all the time for so many things but have so much respect for the Grevens, Everetts and Olsons and their guitar business acumen that it surprised to learn that Greven doesn't have one, but he of course has a lot of skill and experience which I will probably never have.

I do have a planer that I need to set up - might be the solution I'm looking for.

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Lots of ways to thickness wood and I've tried many. Most of them work and all have their pros/cons.

I use a thickness sander now but have used a planer in the past. Planers are great until you try to run that one $300 set with a bit too much figure and the wood explodes in the machine. DAMHIKT

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Thanks Steve, Yeah very leery of the planer but may be OK to get down to a thickness that the sander won't take 50 passes on. Saw some sled ideas but planers are always just a breath away from ruining any piece of thin wood...

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I have the Stewmac Safe-T planer, used it to thickness sides.. ultimately put it away and never used it again. Would not recommend.
I'd done hand planing but really don't prefer it.
That said - I'm a little reluctant to say this because I don't see anyone else using this method. But I've gravitated to a palm sander w/ 60 grit.
I'm a hobbyist, so not ready to invest in a thickness sander. The palm sander does it for me. Takes some time, yes, and have to measure it as you go to assure it's even, doing systematic patterns with each pass. It's worked well for me.

I would highly recommend a gym card to beef up those biceps , and try aerobic workouts. For under 200$ you can buy 3 used tools a number 4 smoother a 5 jack and a number 6 for final truing. These planes wont break the bank. If you prefer new You can also get wooden versions of these from china , They are made of red sandalwood and IMHO an excellent buy. There are numerous tuts on youtube showing the hand planing process. I have had excellent service and a great machine from woodmaster tools. Their drumsanders can be found used as well for way less.

I've used a Wagner Safety Planer for more than forty years. I got it early on when I certainly cvould not afford a sander (they were much less common then), let alone the dust collector system that you also need with one. It's not perfect; the use of 'safety' in the name of any power tool is aspirational (except the Saw Stop), but it's a fine tool within it's limits. It's also a real problem if you don't use it right.

There are three things you need to keep in mind when using one:
1) is it sharp,
2) is it set up right, and
3) is the drill press table really perpendicular to the quill?

Sharp should go without saying in this crowd, but still....

The three cutters must all be at the same level. If one of them is too low or too high (cutting too much or too little) the tool will grab the stock and throw it across the room, enthusiastically. This can be tricky. I bought a second unit some time after the first one and had lots of trouble with it. They had cheaped out a bit in the manufacture; the bottoms of the pockets that held the cutters were not milled flat, and the cutters themselves were slightly warped too. As a result they would not seat properly, and would flip around the first time you tried to use it, throwing the wood. An hour or so of scraping the pockets flat and lapping the cutters to match cured that. If I had not had the experience I did with the tool, I'd have chucked it.

I use a secondary table (a sink cutout) mounted to my drill press table with screws and wedges. This gives me a larger work surface and allows for fine adjustment of the level. It's easy to check: bend a piece of coat hanger wire to a 'Z' shape and chuck it in the drill press. See where it touches to table, and adjust accordingly. I find I need to do this with some frequency: people raising and lowering the table seem to get it out of whack, but it's easy enough to do.

If you observe all of these precautions the tool will cut very smoothly. I allow .2mm (.008") over thickness when running wood on the drill press planer, and find I'm pretty much where I want to be after scraping off the tool marks. If it's not cutting that well, see to your sharpening and setup.

Once you get the hang of it the DPP will do lots of things that your sander will never do, such as roughing in archings for guitars and fiddles, and thicknessing the backs of necks to the proper taper. It will also not make anywhere near the amount of fine dust a sander does.

Finally: the 'safety' thing. It is possible to get your finger tips in under the cutter. The best way to avoid that is to never point your fingers at the cutter. You can arch your hand right over the thing to hold wood down with your fingers pointing away from the cutter, and be perfectly safe so long as you don't get your knuckles into the teeth for the chuck key.

Another alternative for people like me that can't afford the high end thickness sanders is to build one yourself. I made this one from info found on this site. Belt, pully and shaft/bearing all for under $100.



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Brad Hall
Mystic Dawg Guitars

I use a couple of non slip push blocks like these to feed plates though the Safety Planer to avoid digit modification.

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The name catgut is confusing. There are two explanations for the mix up.

Catgut is an abbreviation of the word cattle gut. Gut strings are made from sheep or goat intestines, in the past even from horse, mule or donkey intestines.

Otherwise it could be from the word kitgut or kitstring. Kit meant fiddle, not kitten.

Yup, built one of those many years ago and it works well, just slow.

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Two suggestions - first is to do what I've done for may years - hunt out your local cabinet shop. They usually have much bigger/better/more expensive machines with better extraction. I don't have the space for a big machine and I don't want to spend the money. Then pay them for an hour or two every few weeks. In Germany this would cost me around €200 a year, and they had the job of maintaining the thing. And the results were better than using the small machines. This was making around 20-25 instruments a year. So a pretty good deal.

The second suggestion is to avoid the issue. Or at least avoid thicknessing backs and sides. I laminate a lot of my work these days. Veneer comes ready thicknessed!

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nigel

http://www.theluthierblog.com

As you can see there are a number of different ways to approach the problem. What you may eventually conclude is that planing it close, gluing it up , and finishing with your home made sander will be about as fast and accurate and painless as any other method proposed. The commercial drum sanders are also slow if "thicknessing" involves any significant amount of stock removal. Wide belts are hard to recoup the cost if all you are doing is building a few guitars a year.
One thing I will reiterate - the bench top planers do a better job on thin pieces of wood than do the larger planers.

Just wanted to follow up with an experience a lot of you have probably had. I have a home made thickness/drum sander and it works pretty darn good. I've got to add a small shim to one side to even it out a bit but it's pretty good. I use 80 grit almost exclusively and if I need to take off a lot of wood for what ever reason, primarily some sloppy re-sawing clean-up, it's really slow going. That's why I was inquiring about any other methods.

I also had sitting on the floor of my very small shop a brand new Cutech planer https://www.cutechtool.com/product-p/40200h-ct.htm but it is big and heavy and no where to mount it and seemed like it would sit for a while. Hmm...but if I could only get it to roll around and stash it under the bench when not in use...off to build a rolling cart - but wait I've got an old plastic cart sitting on the side of the garage and was literally going to put it in the trash next chance I got.

The cart was too low, but those pieces of 2 x 8 fascia from shop construction have always been in the way, I'll build a platform for the cart to raise the planer. Done, perfect piece of plywood for the top of the platform. Place planer on cart, roll middle work bench out of the way - perfect place to plane some stock.

Found a 12 x 48" nice piece of plywood in the corner, perfect for a sled for my sides. Glued on a stop on one end, double sided tape for the other end of the side and ran it through the planer. Super fine adjustment - great dust collection - Wow again. Finished like glass. Took the side (Sapele) down to 2.5 mm and will sand to thickness from there.

Should work a treat with all my stock. I have a back set already glued that is now too wide so I'll plane before gluing.

Point of the story which I bet you've all experienced is that I had everything right there, just didn't/wouldn't see it. Can't wait to run more stuff through my new planer and if anyone in the market that seems like a great planer.

Thanks for all the tips and pointers.

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I have a Cutech jointer. Nice tools, that planer should make clean cuts.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Cutech jointer, my next purchase. The planer is amazing...I can now set up my re-saw station and plane between cuts. Knew I bought it for a reason

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"The planer is amazing...I can now set up my re-saw station and plane between cuts. Knew I bought it for a reason"

That is what I do with my jointer - jointers make boards flat, planers make boards even thickness but don't always flatten them (not that big of a deal for most of the short stuff we resaw).

Thanks Clay, not much of wood worker so I fake most everything. Also no jointer at this point so I think the planer will work OK.

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