How to face joint board longer than bench by hand

Question

Project: Bed frame from hard wood (still deciding between cherry, oak, walnut, ash, beech)

Question: What is a good method to face joint a board (approximately 15 cm / 6” wide) by hand with a shorter bench (1.5 m / 6 ft)?

Tools: 16 cm resaw capacity bandsaw, no. 7 jointer plane, no. 4 smoother, plunge track saw, regular handsaws and chisels, Bosch 1600 router

Notes:

1. I don’t see edge jointing as a limitation; just face jointing seems difficult for boards longer than my bench.
2. I don’t have a machine jointer nor thicknesser.
3. I don’t think that a router sled for such a narrow board is needed.

Proposed solutions:

1. Joint the board in sections and iterate through Left, middle, right side until reasonable jointed, but there is a risk that each section is not parallel.
2. Construct a sort of table extension, but I am concerned that the drop in support near the table ends will cause slight issues. I have seen this with small items like Kumiko and even a think shaving under the strip.

Answer 1

Joint the board in sections and iterate through Left, middle, right side until reasonable jointed

Yes.

but there is a risk that each section is not parallel.

Check often, adjust as necessary.

This is basically similar to the problem of how you face anything that is wider than the plane (a somewhat-common occurrence LOL). Because shavings can be on the order of a couple of thousandths and less each (0.04-0.025mm), any resulting discrepancies that need to be addressed are very, very small.

Which leads on to the next point, that the jointer plane is never the last tool to touch the face of a board..... and in fact, unless you're a planing expert your smoothing plane won't be either! So there's plenty of scope for adjustment and refinement as needed.

In short, since you'll be smooth-planing, scraping and/or sanding anyway expect to complete the work with one or more of those steps.

One further tip, don't bother jointing the non-show surfaces. Or at least don't complete the work. This will basically cut the task in half.

In these days of machine processing of stock and powered sanding a dirty secret of woodworking from the days of all handwork has become lost — many pieces only looked perfect from the outside. But peek underneath or behind and you could find that table aprons aren't all uniform thicknesses, the backs of dressers/chests of drawers were not finished equally with the rest of the piece (sometimes left rough from the saw as shocking as this seems to modern sensibilities).