5 Quick Portable Thickness Planer Hacks – Woodworking Tips and Tricks
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As a woodworking professional or enthusiast, you will come to realize that there are machines that tend to have only one main job and little else to do within the workshop. A portable Thickness Planer is one such machine.
Whenever you want your wood cut evenly thick from end to end, this is the machine you use. Despite being quite effective in this endeavor, there’s very little else you can use this machine for around the workshop. That, however, doesn’t diminish its importance.
Let’s take a look at what a Thickness Planer is and a few good tips and hacks to help you get the most out of yours.
What is a Portable Thickness Planer?
As the name would suggest, a thickness planer is a woodworking machine that is designed for planing or milling beams, planks and boards. These machines have a series of knives on revolving shafts as their cutting tools.
There are a number of different types of thickness planers with the main differentiating factor being the cutting tools. Single planers have only one revolving shaft that finishes the top surface of what you are working on; board, plank or beam.
There are also thickness planers that can finish two-surfaces of a board. These have an additional cutting shaft with the first being the path of the board which planes the lower surface while the thickness of the material is determined by the adjustable table.
For the most part, the surfaces you will be working on with a planer would have been subjected to some level of planing on a jointer before taking it through a thickness planer. However, some two-surface planers are a combination of a jointer planer and thickness planer.
In this case, the jointing unit in the machine provides the flat surface that the board needs while the actual wood planer ensures that you can achieve even thickness throughout the material.
As you have already noticed, there are quite several different thickness planers. What you need to know is that these machines work on boards or wood pieces that are between 315 to about 1,250 mm wide and 5 to 160 mm thick.
Your typical thickness planer will have a cutting shaft with a varying diameter of between 100 to about 165 mm. It will also have two or four mounted knives; the shaft will have a rotation speed of about 5,000 rpm as well as a varying feed rate that goes between 5 to 30m/min.
Top Portable Thickness Planer Hacks and Tips to Use
If you are already familiar with using your thickness planer but are curious about how to get some better results, here are some hacks and tricks you can use to achieve that and more:
Hack 1: How to Avoid Snipe
Snipe occurs when the very end of the material (plank of wood) you are working on gets clipped by the planer so that there is a slight depression (less than an mm deep). While this depression might not be as big of a deal, when dealing with precision products, it could mess up the entire outcome.
Since snipe occurs near the last 3 inches of the wood, most woodworking professionals get around it by simply cutting down the material to length AFTER they’ve planed it. This ensures that the snipe isn’t part of the final work.
While that is an excellent approach, it tends to waste quite a bit of wood over time. Another solution to this problem is to simply push the material you are working on through the planer one after the other. This means that there will be no breaks between the first wood to go through the planer and the last one.
This all but ensures that only the final wood to go through; the one that will not have another pushing on its end, will get the snipe. All the rest will be perfect. You can then simply cut the final piece of wood to length after pushing it through.
Hack 2: How to Gang Plane
On some occasions, you will find that you have more than one piece of wood, the same width that needs planing. You could choose to either do them one by one or you could decide to do what is called “gang planing” to save time.
To do this successfully, you need to ensure that these pieces of wood won’t move or detach during the process. This means that you have to attach them to each other somehow.
I find that using double sides tape such as a double-sided carpet tape works just fine. The one downside to this is that the tape is quite difficult to take off once it attaches, which is, incidentally, the number one reason why it works best for this purpose.
Hack 3: How to Slice Figured Wood
When dealing with figured wood and planers, you are almost always going to get “tear out”. This happens because most figure wood material has grains that run in different directions as opposed to straight grains. To avoid this, you can either use a spiral cutterhead planer; if you don’t have one, you can simply run the wood at a slightly skewed angle through your planer.
Hack 4: How to Joint Flat Surfaces
Your planer will definitely make your wood even; that’s what they are designed for after all. They, however, won’t flatten warped boards. If you are looking to flatten just one side of the board, you will need to joint it before planing the flat side.
Here is a video showing you have to make a planing jig that will help you joint flat surfaces with ease on your next workpiece:
Hack 5: How to Shepherd Short Pieces
If you are looking to plane short wood pieces, you would need to employ the same technique as “gang planing”. The only difference this time is that, instead of sticking the boards together, you are going to stick your short board in between two longer ones. This will form something like a ladder with the longer boards being the bread and the shorter board (to be planed) being the filing.
Using the same tape, you would use for gang planing, put all three pieces of boards on a flat surface. Using the double-sided tape on both sides (width) of the shorter board and stick the respective sides to their respective long board edges. Make sure that all the three boards are of similar thickness so that when you run them through the wood planer, they don’t jam.
These are some of the simplest and most effective hacks you can use to increase your productivity as well as achieve better results when using your portable Thickness Planer.