Planing Cedar Boards

   For the past eight months I've had a big stack of rough cut cedar boards,stacked and stickered,  drying in our garage.  After the last few weeks of hot weather they were starting to look fairly dry.  I decided it was time to pull some boards off the pile and try planning them. The correct thing to do would have been to break down and buy a moisture meter to insure the boards were sufficiently dry.  Being a little cheap and impatient I opted for the easier way of just running a few boards through the planner.  They actually seemed to turn out pretty well.  The next steps will be to joint the sides, then round the edges on the router table. Then I'll cut out a notch on opposite sides so I can use them as ceiling boards in the toy room. That seemed more simple to do than tongue and groove.

Cedar board coming out of the planer

Cedar board feeding into the planer

       I only ran twelve boards through the planer, but I generated multiple wheelbarrow loads of shavings for the duck pen.  Between a bountiful supply of cedar shavings and the big load of sand delivered by the Everett Water people, I think I am in pretty good shape for keeping the duck pen sanitary.  The duck pen is as clean as it has ever been. I also generated a little harassment from Linda who thought I should have been working on something else.