I’ve had my Journeyman for a couple of years and looking forward to some upgrades I just bought. These include an Elite upgrade and a Redline 120 V 1.5 KW. I have a couple of Christmas gifts I’m working on, in walnut. The walnut is from some rough cut slabs (very rough). In the past, I burned up a Makita using a Whiteside 6210 and too aggressive DOC @ 100 ipm. I’m looking forward to a lot of things out of the upgrades, but I’m curious if I’ll be able to chuck up my 1/2” surfacing bit and what some realistic expectations are for DOC and speed? Any experiences with Elite and spindle or similar with slab flattening?
I always flatten slabs manually. I have a 2.2kw spindle and use a CMT flattening bit that’s 2 3/8" in diameter at 8000 rpm I have taken off close to an 1/8" in one pass but usually try to stay around 1/16". Usually rough cut wood is so uneven that the first pass or two just takes off the high spots while not even touching the low spots.
As for ipm, it’s not the spindle power that slows things down. I find that it’s the direction of the grain vs which way the 1F is travelling. If I try to take too much off in one pass it’ll start to chatter. Doing it manually means I can just slow down when needed and speed up when I can.
Once the wood has been flattened and I want to dimension it I could do it gcode. Since I’m already set up to do it manually I just finish that way. I do zero the Z axis to the spoilboard so I know how thick the wood is.