Planing Toward the Middle
George VondriskaDescription
When you’re planing a board to thickness, there’s a little more involved than simply shoving the board through your planer. To get the best possible result, in regards to board stability, you should follow a specific sequence of events.
What we’re after
We have a couple of goals when we’re planing wood. One, of course, is to get the board smooth. Another is to make sure that the board has uniform thickness throughout. The planer will also guarantee that both faces of the board are parallel to each other. While all that stuff is happening, we should take a simple step to help the board stay flat after the work with the planer is done.
What we’re avoiding
Sometimes, when wood is dried, the moisture content near the surface can be slightly different than the moisture content at the core. If, when you’re planing, you remove all or most of the material from one face, you can end up with a board that’s prone to cupping. It’s very easy to reduce the likelihood that this will happen.
Our approach
To keep your material as stable as possible when you’re planing the surface make sure you’re removing equal amounts of material from both faces. This is simple to do. Make a pass with one face up, reset the head of your planer, flip the board, make another pass, repeat. This approach, removing equal amounts from both faces and working toward the core, will go a long way toward helping your material stay flat. While you’re doing the work make sure you’re using the planer safely by checking out our planer safety tips.
Keeping your boards as flat as possible is sure to make your upcoming woodworking projects a lot easier to do.
I'm planing a beautiful piece of hickory. Man, what a nice chunk of wood. And here's what I wanna talk about. Question I get all the time. When you're planing stuff down and you wanna keep your material stable. Basically what we're talking about here is mitigating the opportunity for this board to cup or twist, or do anything funky. Here's the thing to think about, especially on thicker stock. When wood gets kiln-dried and it gets kiln-dried well, the material should be very uniform. In other words, if we took a moisture reading and a moisture reading and a moisture reading, everything should be the same. But on thinker stock, sometimes you run into some problems, and even on 4/4 stock, the same thing applies. So part of what this boils down to is when you get to the planer to keep the material flat, to keep it stable, to lessen the opportunity for it to cup or warp. What you really need to do is what I was just doing. Plane a face. When this comes back, flip it, plane a face. When this comes back, flip it. This is a piece of 5/4 stock that I'm gonna take down to an inch. What you don't wanna do is get one face flat, and then take the rest of the 1/4 inch all off of one face. What we wanna do is take equal amounts of material from each face, so that in the end, the core that we work toward is still in the center of the board. So what's left is what was the center of the board when we started. So it's a simple thing, it's easy to do. Just keep track mentally as you're feeding your pieces. Cut, flip, cut, flip, cut, flip. And that's gonna give you the most stable board when you're done, and I'm gonna keep doing that to this beautiful piece of hickory so that it's ready for my project.
Your planer looks just like mine. I notice you did not seem to depress the locking bar between passes. Why not?
I agree with you on alternating sides. However, rather than flipping the board as you did, I usually flip the board end-over-end, especially if the grain viewed from the side is sloped. If the first side is "planed uphill", the second side will be also. There are exceptions of course.
I cut, flip, cut, rotate, cut, flip, cut, rotate, etc. By doing this, it cuts towards the core, and removes any snipes I may happen to get.
I am used to flipping the board after each pass but I usually feed it in so I am cutting “downhill” on the grain which means flipping it end for end.
I agree with alternating sides but I always begin by removing a small amount first until I get the sides parallel and then remove more material but I never remove more than 1/16” at a time. Also to avoid snipe, you can run at an angle or use a piece of scrap. Some woods are very expensive and to loose the last 2 to 3” on a board due to snipe is not acceptable. Anyway, I find this cuts down on snipe.
I understand the concept in the video. However the piece of hickory shown had a large area that was from the rough sawing that was not getting planed. Here is my question. How do you keep the planed sides parallel when flipping the board to evenly remove material? I think the lesson you are providing (please confirm) is sometimes you must violate the rule of removing material on the unjointed side only when you suspect stresses are going be released.