What Is a Planer Used For?

Video Transcript

Hi, my name is Kevin and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you and talk about the use of the planer. The planer is essential in getting wood flat and it pretty much just has one job, after wood comes off of the jointer and you've established a flat surface, what it does is it makes the other face parallel to that. So what you want to do is when you come over here, you want to take your tape measure and you want to measure the thickest part of your board and we're measuring about one inch. Once you've got the thickest part of your board measured, you come over here and there's a measure right here and you want to set that to one inch. It?s not even a bad idea to go just a hair over so that you can creep up on the fit. With this machine, same as with machines, you want to keep it waxed and in good working order so that the wood goes through the machine very easily and gives you a nice smooth cut. The other thing to keep in mind here is same as with there, you want to take a look at the grain and we've got the grain running downhill this way. On this machine, with the knives cutting in this direction, we want to orient the grain so that when the machine is cutting, it?s going downhill from there and so we'll put it through like this. Also, after your first pass, you'll notice if the wood is tearing out because with the tropical wood, you get grain going in a lot of directions and so that after that first pass, you're looking to see what the jointer tells you, if there's a lot of tear-out, you simply flip the board around end for end and feed it in that way and see if you get less tear-out. Sometimes there's nothing you can do about tear-out, but the first pass will generally tell you if you need to flip it around or not, so that's something that you want to pay attention to, but for the first pass, you'll always want to try and orient it so that the blades are cutting downhill on the grain and you get a nice smooth cut. As you just saw, with the use of the planer, we've now established two faces of the board parallel to one another. On this way we can see the grain on both sides of the board which is going to help you select your wood for use later on in the project. You'll be able to take them more pristine slightly parts of the board and put those in more visible places and vice-versa the parts of the board that may have slight imperfections can become lesser seen parts of the project. As you saw with the use of this machine, very important to use headphones because it?s a very loud machine. Also with this machine, as with all machines, very important to keep the steel bed waxed and the knives really sharp so it gives a nice, smooth cut free of tear-out and just general safer use. Now that we're established two faces parallel to one another, the next step is to take and get an edge perpendicular to those two faces so that from there we can go to the table saw and establish those two edges parallel to one another.

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