The planks I've bought have been rough-sawn on a big band saw, and after that they have warped a little, leaving one side dished and the other..... er ... convex. The big band saw obviously has a couple of misaligned teeth, so the result is that there's a series of gashes across the wood at regular intervals. I have to plane both sides far enough to be able to take out these saw-cuts.
It's ironic that it's only the very big bits of wood that I have to work by hand, with old-fashioned planes. The thinner ones will go through the planer on the machine. These have both their weight against them, and their width - the planer would in theory manage up to 20cm, and these are 25cm. But I don't think I'd want to risk them in the machine anyway.
The wood has also been of distinctly variable quality - the third stringer was very difficult, cross-grained on all four edges, so that it had to be planed in different directions. This one, however, was an ideal piece: all the grain in the same direction, no knots to speak of: just those band saw cuts to be removed. It started like this - I've put in a couple of strokes of the plane to show the wood surface:
After about twenty minutes with the small coffin plane, it looked like this:
I couldn't quite bring myself to finish the concave side before starting the convex one, so I was turning it over from time to time:
Later on, I'd got it looking pretty clean, except at the edges:
And by the time I was properly satisfied, I think I must have taken about a millimetre off both sides. And that took most of the afternoon. But it won't be long now before I start putting up the newel posts and trying to fit the stringers into them. That would be a milestone.
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