All About Wood Planers

The plane has been a staple of any woodworkers toolbox since we started manipulating the environment around us. From a simple sharp stone dragged down a length of wood, to the most complicated wood planers today, the history of the plane is a long and productive one. The purpose of a plane is to shape wood. To flatten, smooth, reduce the thickness or finished wood to a desired angle or finish.

What began with a hand plane, which needed muscle power to achieve anything, has now evolved into electric wood planers that take the effort out of creating beautiful woodwork in a fraction of the time. Electric wood planers come in two flavors, hand-held or stationary. The hand-held planer is a power tool shaped like a sander with the blade at the bottom with a dust and shaving collector. The stationary planer can be either bench or floor mounted and will have rollers to feed the stock through two or three knives spinning at high speed. It is these knives that removes the wood to the desired thickness.

A good quality stationary wood planer will have an infeed table at one end which will feed the stock through the machine, and an outfeed table at the other end. These are generally ten or fourteen inches wide, which is the maximum thickness the machine can cope with. Machine shops will have much larger devices, but this size should be more than adequate for hobbyist use.

The infeed table will have rollers, which feed the stock into the machine. It guides the stock through the planer and passes it to a counterpart on the outfeed table. This roller then takes the stock and passes it clear of the blades so it can be retrieved. The rollers move at a constant speed to ensure the wood finish is as even as possible. A relatively slow pass through, with a high cutter speed will give the best finish.

For extra safety, the infeed and outfeed rollers should come with a pawls or spikes, which will grab the wood as it passes through. This is to prevent kick-back if the rollers lose their grip on the wood. When passing wood through a wood planer, it’s a good idea to keep hold of it until the rollers have a good purchase on it and then quickly let it go.

Cutting depth on a wood planer is adjusted using a hand-crank. The average depth is up to six inches, which again, should be more than adequate for the vast majority of applications. The idea is to set the blades so they shave a little off the wood each pass, which will give a much smoother, even finish to the wood, and not strain the knives or motor.

The wood planer is another technological advance that has divided woodworking. Traditionalists saw power tools take the soul out of the trade, and modern woodworkers say it improves efficiency and productivity too much to ignore. Whatever side of the fence you’re on, there is no doubt that these tools really do make life easier.