If you often saw your own veneers and bent laminates, cleaning up the rough-sawn faces to a uniform thickness can be daunting when you don't own a drum or belt sanding machine. After a major downsizing, I let go of my drum sander due to space constraints, however for a recent commission I thought I would see what I could achieve in this regard with my excellent, spiral cutter-equipped Felder AD 410 planer/thicknesser.
Not even this remarkable machine is always able to avoid flimsy, thin stock from being lifted up into the cutter-block and getting torn apart, especially as the piece is first fed in. I wanted to take straight-grained solid wood down to 1mm thick, something most machines can’t do without a table-raising, sacrificial platform.
The problem is keeping the veneer held down flat against the thicknesser table as it goes through the machine, especially at that critical point just below the cutter-block. This led me