Not all wood is created equal. It can have swells and depressions in a seemingly smooth surface which, if you plan to make near-perfect joints and seams, a wood working planer will be a necessity in your shop.

Once a board is cut from a log and dried, this is when cracking and splitting happens. Rarely will wood be flat and smooth when you first buy it from the lumber yard and it will have to be prepared to make a finished project, such as furniture. While many wood workers will use nothing but hand tools, there are power tools that make the job quicker and easier and one of these is the wood working planer.

A functioning wood working planer will have two tables, a feed table and an outfeed table which will hold the board level and straight against the fence. The wood working thickness planer will have a rotating, drum-like cutting blade which can be adjusted for depth to determine the amount of wood planed off during each pass.

Normally, a wood working planer will take off between 1/32 and 1/64 of an inch at a time and the board is passed through the wood working planer until the board is flat, smooth and both side are parallel.

Plane all Boards to Same Thickness

To provide a smooth edge to the thin sides of the board, a jointer planer is used. Usually one pass on a jointer planer is enough to provide an even edge but it will often not be parallel to the other edge. The board must be passed through on both edges for it to be the same width for the entire length.

Once you have planed the board on all four sides, it should have parallel sides the entire length. And, once all the boards for your project have been worked, you can run them across the wood working planer to make them all the same thickness by removing a small amount of wood on each pass until they are all the same.

While passing wood over the blades of a wood working planer, whether the jointer or surface planer, pressure needs to be applied to hold the board against the cutting blades. While holding the board down, the operator feeds the board onto the outfeed table. There are professional jointer/planers which have a spring loaded device to keep constant and even pressure on the board as it goes through the wood working planer.