Slight Skew on Front Slab – How best to proceed?

[landslide]

Hey Guys --

Last night I planed down my slab glue ups to final thickness. As a relatively newbie to woodworking, my front slab glue up, which I did first, was not as good as my second glue up, the back slab. When I inspected the slabs after the glue I saw there was some twist in the front slab, but the back slab was pretty straight and good. So I went to work with my #5, which is also new to me, and did the best I could. I then passed the slabs through my planer. Now, the back slab came out just perfect. Everything is square and true and it looks wonderful. But my front slab is not as good. It ended up being slightly skewed, like a parallelogram. Here are some pics of a t-square against the right and left sides of the slab:

http://imgur.com/a/zFjFI

You see the gap? The discrepancy is pretty even on both sides.

Here's my idea for how to proceed, but I wanted to check with the forum first.

My thought is to pass the slab over the jointer and flatten one side, and then pass that through the planer to make it all square. Now, I deliberately left ample thickness on my front laminate just in case -- you never know. So the board I milled for the front laminate is right about 1-3/4", and all I really need according to the cut list is 1-1/2". It looks to me like the gaps in my front slab are perhaps 1/16", max. So if I make it all rectangular I could lose, what, 1/8" or maybe at most 1/4"? So I think my plan will work such that, when all is said and done, I have the final width for the front slab i need.

HOWEVER. That plan will effectively move the vice, dog holes, etc over some fraction of an inch... so I wonder how wise a plan it is...

thanks for your advice!

etienne

[AMarshall]

Your plan sounds good to me, and I think the impact on the locations of the dog holes, etc is minimal. My biggest concern is that it's going to be quite difficult to pass that big heavy slab across a jointer. If you have a fairly large (meaning long bed) jointer, go for it. Another option is to flip the slab on its side and go to work with your number 5 again. That's not too much material to remove, and you can sneak up on it so you don't lose more width than necessary. The slabs are thick enough so that you could use some winding sticks and your combination square and get a nice flat face perpendicular to the face of the slab. For the second edge, run it through the planer like you said.

[rmac]

No offense, but you might want to do a quick check to make sure your square is square before you do much of anything else. From the picture, it looks like it might have come from the big box store, and sometimes those can be off by quite a bit.

-- Russ