Last weekend, I was trying to flatten some ebony for tops for the bridges that I make using a Stanley Sweetheart plane (great tool) and the ebony seemed to have some hard deposits in them occasionally that was dinging the blade and causing "stripes" in the planed surface so I needed a better solution.
I am using 7/8 x 7/8 x 6" blanks and flatten 2 faces then bandsaw off .150" slices. I then started using the table saw to rip the surface flat which worked pretty well until I got a kickback with one of the pieces. Lucklily I am pretty paranoid about getting injured with a tablesaw so I use a Gripper push block. The blade didn't contact the push block but sent the piece of ebony at high-speed into the fence and bounced into my chest and left the attached 7/8" x 7/8" injury. It later swelled up and turned black/blue/yellow to about the size of a baseball. So no more using the tablesaw for this.
So, I decided to use the CNC router with a flattening bit (1" diameter) and devised the attached pneumatic holding fixture. It is working really well for me so far. I have the pressure adjusted to about 30 psi which is about 50lbs of holding force. All parts were sourced from Amazon and I'm planning to write up a post on my website listing the parts and build.
Here is a video of it also.
Edited by - euler357 on 08/04/2024 13:29:08
Nice, necessary safety "fix" you did there !
You're lucky.....the injury could have been a lot worse.....looks painful enough as it is.
It wasn't too bad but it could have been much worse if I wasn't using the gripper. My saw is a 20 year old craftsman with no riving knife. I've ordered a new zero clearance insert and splitter for it. Thinking about a sawstop in the future.
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