Unavoidable tear-out?

[Grumple]

Hey guys,

It took longer than I care to admit, but I have finally finished making my accent strips, and planing all the rough strips down to an even 1/4". Next up is putting a bead-and-cove on them. I'm nervous about that step as I have very little router experience, but that's another story...

I ran into one issue while making my accent strips, and I'm wondering what could have been done to avoid it. The strips are made of dark walnut and aspen, and I'm pretty happy with them so far. However, both the aspen and walnut turned out to have a few small knots (or at least that crazy grain that winds around a knot). I didn't see these until the strips were cut from blanks.

Regardless of the direction I ran the strips through the planer, the areas of the strips where the knots/crazy grain was located experienced minor tear out. I had my planer blades freshly sharpened, and was only taking 1/64" per pass on the planer.

What (if anything) else could I have done to eliminate tear-out in these problem areas?

I think I made one mistake in that at least one blank got glued together with aspen and walnut in opposite grain directions, but it really didn't seem to matter which direction the strip was planed when it came to these knotty areas...

[Phantom Power]

Unfortunately that is pretty much unavoidable in some situations with a thickness planer. A helical cutting head can help but with wild grain it's always going to be against the grain somehow.

A thickness planer is a great machine but I tend to regard it as a 'rough' tool which doesn't produce a finished surface.

For canoe strips this really isn't an issue because once you get the strips on the molds that is far from the finished surface you'll have anyway. The fairing and sanding are going to be removing material all over. As long as your tearout isn't deeper than the sanding you'll be doing then it is inconsequential.

If you were building a piece of furniture and the boards you were planing would be a table top or something similar then you'd probably go over it with a scraper or smoothing plane (or sanding) before finish to remove tearout and machine marks from the thickness planer.

[Grumple]

Ok thanks, Phantom. That's pretty much what I figured, but it's nice to hear it confirmed by someone with more experience.