This workbench cabinet project was one in which I intended to use up all the random scraps of wood that had accumulated because I can’t bear to throw away wood that might one day be used.  So I had a number of short pieces of oak with which to front my drawers.  Unfortunately, they were all of slightly different thicknesses since they all dated from different projects and most of them were too thick.  So off I went to my good friend’s house – he has a surface planer and a thickness sander.

These two power tools make possible a job that would be pretty much impossible with hand tools but even so, it took us a hour and maybe a bit more to reduce all this hardwood to the proper thickness.  It’s loud work so you can’t talk, you can only stand on opposite sides of the tool and pass pieces of wood back and forth; one feeding it in, the other pulling it out.

In the end, I had a bunch of oak of the proper thickness and a bunch of walnut that was also properly dimensioned for my next project.  I tried to dimension a piece of this with a handplane but it was extremely difficult and I got nowhere with it. 

I’m coming down the home stretch now.