Post by jb34 on Mar 17, 2010 9:35:08 GMT -6
Saw this in a magazine and it looked fun. I am not the greatest photographer. I noticed in the pictures I must be heavier on the left as i seem to lean to the left when I take pictures. But as far as the peel I am happy how it came out. In the magazine I saw they had also used walnut and hard maple. They had half inch stripes of hard maple and the toal length of the handle was 24 inches and the width was 11.5 inches. I tend to always want to make things bigger but I wanted a peel that could hold even a jumbo pizza. So mine is 16 inches wide, 17.5 inches deep and the handle is 32 inches. I wanted a long enough handle so you can support the jumbo pizzas on it with your elbow on the back of the handle in addition to your hand. It feels comfortable doing that to me. The hard maple on mine is 3/4 inch strips. Since it was too wide for my planer I had to plane the pieces seperately instead of just running the whole thing through. The price I paid for wanting to go bigger on this and my planer only being 12.5 wide. I put a couple angled shims under the pieces to get the proper blade angle so it slides under the pizza easily and planed them out. Then once I joined them I hand planed off any unevenness and sanded it all down. I still have to attach a leather strap on the top for hanging. But I am happy with how it turned out. The curves at the back I just drew them in to mirror each other and jig sawed them off. I was happy with getting them to be pretty much exact mirrors since I free handed that. Finished it with some butcher block mineral oil. My mom heard I was doing this and wanted me to fix a butcher block she had so I am onto another butcher block type piece. If I do another one of these pizza peels for someone else I will try to keep it under 12.5 inches so I can just slide it all into my planer at once. But for myself I wanted big big big. Should look nice on the wall as well.
