Making a coffee table - advice on belt sander / thicknesser / another idea

[jonfaulkner (Jonathan Faulkner)]

Woodworking advice please! I’m making a coffee table with a waterfall end, using a large slab of wood. I’m going to be cutting the wide end off and reattaching at 90 degrees. It’s 530mm at the widest point and 1800mm long.

The central void is filled with clear, hardened, epoxy that sits couple of mm proud of the wood.

The epoxy is 130mm at the widest and 1300mm long.

I don’t trust myself to keep my carbide scraper level and it would take forever with my sander (which would also be hard to keep flat). If I had access to a wide belt sander, or a thicknesser that could take something 530mm wide, I think it would only need a few passes to flatten it all. But I’m not sure if the SLMS sander/thicknesser are that wide?

The wood is only 25mm thick, so ideally I don’t want to get a flattening jig as while I have used one successfully before, it took more than I had intended and I’ve no thickness to spare this time.

Any advice? Are the SLMS tools in fact big enough for this? Or any other ideas on how I do it? Thanks!!!

[Christian (Christian from Earlsfield)]

You could be helped with the Big CNC and our new surfacing tool.

[lewisss (Mark Johnson)]

The big drum sander will fit that Make sure all the sealant dam (looks like hot glue )is removed from the epoxy and go slow, 1/8th of a turn on the handle each time

[Matt_Carter]

I think @Benpace had an issue with the drum sander dropping onto his piece recently

[Benpace (Ben Pace-O’Shea)]

Yea i put my tabletop through the drum sander and found it would get stuck at random moments with no warning. I was doing 1-2mm passes, so nothing that should stress it out. Every time it got stuck, i to would leave a big groove across the piece. I ended up giving up and hand planing the whole thing flat manually.

From chatting with people, i believe it to be the rollers inside the drum sander that are slipping. Whatever you do, i’d run a scrap piece through before anything you care about. I’ve personally lost all trust in the machine after it left 3 or 4 deep-ish grooves on my work lol

(we also replaced the sanding paper on the machine while trying to do my tabletop. So at least thats nice and fresh!)

[Benpace (Ben Pace-O’Shea)]

Images of the groove it left on one side and the wonkyness of the sanding it did on the other side

[lewisss (Mark Johnson)]

I was doing 1-2mm passes,

This could be the answer … the planer you can get away with 1-2mm passes, the sander you should be doing 0.5mm maximum, with larger pieces like that 0.25 mm,

1 révolution of the handle is about 2mm which is why I said above 1/8th of a revolution each time.

[Benpace (Ben Pace-O’Shea)]

with this info, we were doing a max of 1/8th of a turn, so a tiny tiny movement and it was still getting stuck. I wasnt aware a full turn was 2mm, my previous comment was a guess of how much it was taking off.

[mbg (Max G)]

Edit: nvm, should’ve read through the thread before commenting

[lewisss (Mark Johnson)]

with this info, we were doing a max of 1/8th of a turn, so a tiny tiny movement and it was still getting stuck

Then I need to look at tightening the feed belt, I will do it next time I am in