Reply To: Help with Thicknessing Please!!! :-)
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I often wonder if this would really have been done, traditionally. It is so much work to hog off 3/8″ and so wasteful of material. It is also a lot of work to resaw. So, I wonder if traditionally the work would have been left to the mill and the craftsman would have purchased 2/4 material. Flatten a side and then take as little as possible from the other to get a show face and you’d be in the ballpark of 3/8″. If you are using hand methods rather than machine methods, it doesn’t really matter if the material is the same thickness for all the members, as long as it is visually acceptable. So, if you had 5/16 on one piece and 7/16 on another, and exactly 3/8 on another, it would look fine in most cases. You could built to exact dimensions, e.g., outer dimensions of a drawer, while the inside dimension (where the socks go) varied a bit, but with zero consequence. So, I really wonder if we are making things harder for ourselves and not fully taking advantage of what hand tools can do. Of course, if we don’t have access to the (rough) thickness we need from the mill, then we need to compensate somehow.
This isn’t a useful reply for your problem, but I wonder if someone knows if the mill did more of the work back then and you could get thinner rough material, like 2/4. I’m not sure that I’ve seen less than 4/4. A bandsaw may be the answer.