[Strawbale] Natural, inexpensive kitchen cabinets

[Chris Green]

Andrew Lund wrote:
> We have a 13'' Rigid planer... Built our home almost 100% from rough-cut lumber and planed what we needed too. It's been a great machine. Snipe can be a little bad, even with the cutter head lock, but rough boards are usually 4''-8'' extra long anyways. 
The Rigids look like good planers. I have a lot of Rigid power tools.

You can get rid of some of the snipe by running one board through on one 
side, say the right, then feeding the next board on the opposite side 
(on the left) while the first board is still going through and has a few 
inches left. This limits you to running 6" wide stock, of course.

I built a tilted auxiliary infeed table for my planer so I can run 
boards through and get a precise 67 1/2 degree angle on one edge. This 
is used to make pieces  that will join together to become the 135 degree 
corners needed for making  octagonal  cabinets or  window trim.
One guy I worked with for a while  used some upright guides on the 
infeed side that allowed him to run 2x boards through his DeWalt  and 
plane the edges like a jointer.
Another guy I worked for built an infeed table with about a 15 degree 
tilt to it and ran through a bunch of 2x8 or 10 stock to make something 
that looked like thick tapered siding. I didn't know what he was up to 
and was quite ticked off because he was planing all this wood inside the 
house just after I'd done a "full-press 'forensic clean-up'."  He 
created another two or three jumbo bags of sawdust for me to clean 
up...grrr.  But it turned out he was making fancy pour strips for the 
concrete foundation for the front porch. When the concrete pour was 
later stripped we had a kind of  exposed molding detail formed right in 
the concrete. It looks sharp, and  the house is probably the only one in 
the city with this feature. Until someone else does this...so I forgave 
him for the mess....
He had the new 15" DeWalt planer, and I was quite impressed by just how 
quiet this machine is...for a planer.

Cheers,

Chris Green.