Planer test and Knife Block project

I had to resist the urge to put every piece of wood in the shop through the new planer. The surface it leave is amazing. I planed down some spalted maple I had cut from a piece of firewood into 1/4" boards for a small box I plan on building. Over the weekend I took some of the walnut that my grandma had given me a started building a knife block from it. I got the plans for the knife block from Popular Woodworking.  Then plans called for 1/2" thick stock so I used the planer and planed down the walnut to 1/2" thick before cutting the parts to size.

I also did some "wood working" building a new well cap from composite deck boards. The hand pump is functional.

 A upcoming project is going to be building a chip separator to work with my shop vac. The planer creates a lot of chips and dust. The picture below is how much was created by planing the two  32"x7.5"x 3/4" pieces of walnut to a final thickness of 1/2".