After getting the plywood all cut to size and labeled, we began working the rough sawn Red Oak. This meant getting out the planer. These steps could be skipped if you do not have a planer, time or the patience. The dimensional wood you can buy at Lowes, Home Depot, etc. will work just fine. If you want better wood, but want it all set to go, check out your local hardwood supplier or saw mill. You can buy dimensional lumber from these manufactures which will most likely be of a higher quality. Google is your friend here. 
Step one was to take each rough sawn board and run it through the planer, taking a small amount of material, flip the board over and repeat, and repeat and repeat…
This turned out to be a very painstaking process. As I understand it, this has more to do with the size of the machine and the number of the blades. The bigger the machine the more material you can take off with each pass. Since Tim’s has a smaller planer, we could not be too aggressive. So, after many passes, the wood was close to the desired 3/4" thickness.
After a few passes:
After some more passes, we have some pretty nice wood:
That is all that was completed on day one. Next step is to sand it all!
Wheres the done pics?
tim
March 26th, 2006