Festool sander as a thickness sander?

[Dave Bagwill]

Yes, I was in Brian Burns' shop learning how to sharpen planes and scrapers, and he demonstrated both, and oh good golly...he could scrape a side down or a back down quickly. I mean, he put his back to it and that wood went DOWN.
Then he used his block plane to get it to the thousandths he wanted. It was a beautiful thing, and now that I have a little wood to play with, I'm going to to just learn to do it. When I get serious wood ;-) I'll be ready with the hand tools and the safety planer.

[Dave Bagwill]

This is not Brian, nor is this a luthier, but it does show a woodworker quickly taking down some pretty rough stock to a finish worthy surface in a few minutes. Interesting, at least.
http://youtu.be/OHEFyllWmZE

[Brian Itzkin]

I use a low angle veritas smoothing plane for thicknessing, them I scrape (if it's a hard wood), or use my festool ro sander to clean everything up. In total it probably takes my half an hour to thickness both the top and back.

Tony, if I remember correctly you have inexpensive low quality planes. It seems no matter how much you try and tune those things up they'll never work well (I know from personal experience). Try a veritas, lie Nielsen, vintage stanley bedrock and you'll see a huge improvement.

[Tim Benware]

I need to try my Saf-T-Planer too. However, since I have the drum sander, I will stick with it for now.
I am not sure how much fun scratch builds would be without the drum sander. I can not imagine thinning a whole back with a scraper. I watched a video of a guy thicknessing a back, EIR I think, with a plane, he even got his 10 year old son to do it, and they made beautiful fluffy shavings. I must not have my blades sharp enough. I know my plane is flat for I lapped it myself. its gotta be the blade.
I learned a bunch watching the Brian Burns sharpening video that was posted here. I need to implement some of his techniques and see what happens.

I didn't think I'd need a safe-t-planer until I purchased some adi tops that are .185 thick. To me that's too much for the thickness sander. So I went on a search to get one and lo and behold I was too late, out of business and if you can find one they're around $180 now. Found what appears to be a good knock-off but they are on BO until May. Should got one when I coulda.

[Dave Bagwill]

I need to make a correction - I just talked with Brian Burns and, while he could thickness hard or soft woods with hand tools, he does not recommend it, and instead uses a Gilbert sanding disk on a drill press, and has been using it for years.

[ken cierp]

So here's the "John Gilbert sanding disk" never heard of until today:

http://www.schrammguitars.com/jgsdisc.jpg

[Dave Bagwill]

You can purchase the machined disk, 5" diameter, for $60. Brian puts some h&l paper on it, turns on his dust collector, and goes to town. He gets some seriously well sanded tolerances. In fact, he will get down to laminate - .045" - measurements consistently.
This works on even a very modest drill press.

Here are two pix that show the basics. (From Brian B)