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Location: Orlando, Florida
1a. Wet with mineral spirits prior to feeding into power planer. Very light cuts. Finish with drum sander or hand sander.
1b. Upgrade to a spiral cutter head on your power planer.
2. Rough dimension with power planer, then switch to hand plane - very sharp blade with tight mouth and chip breaker set very close to the edge (like less than 0.5 mm close).
3. All hand plane.
4. Find a local shop that has a spiral cutter head planer and/or large belt sander.
Still Learning,
Allan Hill
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I've had decent luck with heavily moistening with Mineral Spirits and taking very, very light passes.
Water, Denatured Alcohol or Naptha did not work as well.
Also keep an eye out for which direction created the most tear out and reverse for the next pass to see if that reduces the tear out. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it's worse.
Ultimately, I did have to do some scraping with hand planes and card scrapers.
~Dan.
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I use a helical head which makes a huge difference. When I still used straight knives I just kept a spray bottle of water next to to my planer. A quick spritz of water, let it soak in for about a minute and run it through. If you don't let the water soak in it will not work very well. That is the reason I don't use MS. It just flashes off too fast. That along with a slow feed rate and taking off about 1/32" at a pass should do the trick.
