Voted Best Of 2023 - Top 10 4 Foot Wood Planer

Thickness planers produce a lot of dust and wood chippings. The machines are capable of tearing and spitting out small pieces of wood. After a few boards, the floor beneath a thickness planer will look like a child's play area.

Most benchtop planers today have dust ports which can be connected to a vacuum cleaner or dust collection system. This helps to reduce the mess. These systems are also effective at removing dust before it settles in the cutterhead. This helps to prolong the life of the machine and maintain its cutting speed.

It can be time-consuming to remove the desired amount of wood from your workpieces. It could take up to six passes to bring a hardwood from a thickness of 1 inch down into a thickness of 5/8 inches. It would be possible to measure the thickness of the board before each pass, and then adjust the cutterhead with a combination square or tape measure. However, this is time-consuming.

Most benchtop planers today have an integrated gauge, which looks like a rule attached to the side intake slot. The gauge will show the thickness of the board as you raise or lower the carriage (the upper part of the tool) using a hand-crank.
Some planer gauges show measurements as 1/64th-inch increments. Some woodworkers are so experienced that they don't even use the gauge. Instead, they determine the cutting depth using the tool's manual crank. A full rotation of the hand crank on a planer is equal to 1/16 inch. A quarter of a hand crank is equal to 1/64 inch.

A depth stop prevents the user from cutting more than the maximum depth of the machine. If the maximum cutting depth is 1/8 inches, for example, the depth-stop will prevent users from inserting boards that are more than 1/8 of an inch thicker than what was selected on the gauge. The board will simply not fit into the slot. The depth stop will prevent users from cutting deeper than the maximum depth.

The thickness allowance of a planer is the largest (and tallest board) that can pass through the tool. Most planers are labeled with a range between 12 and 13 inches, which is plenty for woodworkers. But this measurement doesn't give the full picture.

This means that a planer with a 12 inch width can also handle boards up to 12 inches tall. However, it does not specify how thick a piece of timber can be. To get the best use from a woodplaner, look for models that can handle materials up to 5 or 6 inches thick.

There are two types of thick planer knives: spiral and straight. Each style has pros and cons. Straight knives resemble long safety razors. The blades are bolted to the cutterhead, which is a rotating barrel within the planer. This spins the barrel and shaves thin layers of wood off as the board moves through the machine. Some exceptional models allow three blades. This is beneficial to those who want the smoothest surface.

The blades on straight knife models vary. Some models are reversible so that when they get dull, you can flip them over and use their other side. Some knives have only one sharp side, but can be sharpened manually with a sharpening tool, much like a kitchen blade. Sharpenable knives used to be the norm for benchtop planers until the last decade. The user would remove the knives when the wood was rougher than normal, sharpen them, and then place them back into the cutterhead. Reversible knives can be thrown away after both sides have worn down.

Spiral blades (or helical blades) work in a very different way. Spiral cutterheads are made up of multiple smaller knives that are offset in a spiral. Spiral knives planers produce more consistent results than straight knife planers. However, they are usually reserved for high-end machines used by wood manufacturing companies. All of the planers that we tested had cutterheads made to accept straight blades.

Cutting depth is the amount of material that a woodplaner can remove with one pass. In general, the stronger the planer is, the greater the amount of material that can be removed in a single pass, and the deeper the cut.

For rough, weathered or coarse woods, planers with a maximum shaving depth of 1/8" are ideal. It's not always best to remove that much wood at once. It's best to plane smaller amounts and err on caution. This is good for both the board and the machine. The harder a planer has to work the more wood it removes, and this can cause overheating.

Woodworkers may find that they don't need to remove much more than a 1/16-inch-wide strip per pass. For fine-tuning, some will even remove less, a 1/32-inch-wide or 1/64-inch-wide strip. Do not overlook a planer because it does not remove 1/8 of an inch in one pass. You can easily set the planer to 1/16 inch, and then run through it twice.

After planing, a snipe is an unwanted line that can be very visible. The wood planer removes more wood from the end of the boards. Gravity tends to pull down the board as the end clears the rollers. This puts pressure on the opposite end. The cutterhead blades will remove a little more wood from the end when this occurs. A snipe is a small dip, usually less than 1/16 inch in width. It's located at the end of the board.

Reduce snipe by having someone hold the piece of board that has already been through the thickness planer. Some snipe is inevitable, but certain benchtop thickness planes are better at minimizing it. To avoid snipe on your finished product, plan boards an inch longer than you need to and cut off the sniped end before using them for your project.

The motor of a benchtop plane needs to be powerful enough to do the job. The amount of power needed depends on the project.

A motor of 1 to 1 1/2 hp might be suitable for users who work with soft woods like pine, cedar and fir, such as when building birdhouses or country-style furniture. It doesn't take much power to remove a thin layer of wood from these materials.

If they are into high-end cabinetry or joinery, they will probably use species like oak, maple and even walnut. This is because the planer will need to be more powerful in order to smooth out these hard materials.
The motor rating of a planer is more important than the horsepower. Choose one with a motor rated at 15 amps. Planers use a lot electricity. A motor with 15 amps will ensure that they are able to handle the job without breaking down. Motors with lower amps do not have enough power to plane wood.