Did something I've never done with my planer

[Eurekan]

Today I'm working on a glued up panel with highly figured QSWO. I usually glue thick and then plane down to thickness. Today's panel was chipping out no matter which direction I went or how lightly I engaged the cutters. The panel was 12x12 so could not really get it in diagonally which is my usual procedure when this happens. I was desperate. This figure in the panel was beautiful and I didn't want to lose it. So, in desperation and as lightly as possible, I put the panel in across the grain. WOW! No chip out! I was able to get the panel down to the proper size easily.  The surface finish was about equivalent to 60 grit sandpaper but I could live with that.  

I've never tried this before and I can't find anyone mentioning this. Anybody else do this? Was I just lucky? 

FYI - I have a WEN planer with the spiral HSS tooth set. Works great but that another story.

[barryvabeach]

I have never done it with a planer, with with a hand plane it is pretty common to plane cross grain - the surface is rougher than with the grain, but you can remove lots of wood quickly, and it is useful to flatten a wide board or panal-  actually, it is very common to also go at a 45 degree angle to the grain when flattening a surface.

[Eurekan]

As i said, I do some panels on the diagonal but that was not possible here. And I have hand planed across the grain but never at 90deg for anything large. So, power planing across the grain was a new one to me.

[rwe2156]

QSWO is bad about grain switching every which way. You didn't discover something, you got lucky.

Helical head or better, a drum sander.

[alanealane]

I did an experiment a few years back because the boss didn't want to buy a drum sander to customize Baltic birch plywood to a particular thickness, so I put a piece in the planer and as soon as I hit a cross grain layer it pretty much exploded inside the planer and the whole ply flew apart. Granted the planer blades were less than razor sharp. But the point got across and he bought a new drum sander soon thereafter! Glad you had better sucess power planing across the grain. But I wouldn't do it with plywood again... Ever