I think everyone has that same kinda thing happen. You start with a goal and think of what seems like the easiest way to approach it. Then as it gets closer you see issues with that approach and modify either the goal or the path to get there. That’s basically engineering in a nutshell! Nothing wrong with stubbornly pursuing a path trying to make it work, that’s also called determination. Also nothing wrong with giving up on an approach and trying a different method, that’s also called innovation!
Yeah, just a random thought about how to do a repeatable thickness/finish pass on a bunch of slices of that board for a chopping board or similar. I’d probably just stick down a couple of pieces to align everything in the same position so that I can just run the same job over and over and then double-sided tape the pieces in place, or clamp them against the blocks if they’re thick enough, etc. Or a toe-clamp type thing maybe, etc. Vacuum chuck if I were going to do heaps, maybe?
Thanks for the kind words, I really appreciate it! To be clear, I know very little about mechanical engineering, that was mostly just a stream of consciousness of reasoning my way through the subject.
To expand on what Ryan is saying, I agree that completely rebuilding a table to be dead flat is unlikely to actually be what anyone needs. I probably got a bit carried away with describing how I’d approach the puzzle of creating a large table on a smaller router.
I don’t think I quite agree that tramming the router and surfacing the table will get you to where you need to be to have joint-worthy surfaces for that board, but I don’t think you’d necessarily get there with a fancier dead-flat table, either, honestly.
I think that’s absolutely the key takeaway and what I believe is part of the fun of hobby woodworking.
One thing that took me a while to figure out for myself is that in a lot of cases I prefer to make things by hand rather than use anything CNC related. Depending on the goal I find it way more fun to just glue/nail bits of scrap together to proof-of-concept something than spend hours modelling something and 3D printing it etc. There’s definitely a time and place for both but I think the capability of CNC tools can lead to an unnecessary focus on them being the primary/only tool for a job. It’s hard work to outrun a circular saw when it comes to changing the shape of something, though!
I agree generally, I just don’t think that’s the case for trying to accurately joint the face on a long thick board. I think the answer is ‘don’t do it that way’.