Noob Jointer / planer questions

You use them in conjunction with one another. Jointers make boards flat and square. Planers make the sides parallel and of a specific thickness.

-- We must guard our enthusiasm as we would our life - James Krenov

smboudreaux: You can use a thickness planer to face joint a board, but you need a sled to do it. I built this planer sled from Fine Woodworking and it works great:

http://www.finewoodworking.com/SkillsAndTechniques/SkillsAndTechniquesArticle.aspx?id=5245

To view the plan, you need to have a membership, but watching the video will give you the concept.

While this method works, I still use my No. 7 or No. 8 jointer plane to make sure that the face is indeed flat. Good luck.

Steven

very useful article there steve.

now this may be a dumb question but the majority of the lumber i buy is 1 straight edge and 2 milled sides. would this lumber need to be run through a jointer or would it typically be flat enough run through a planer w/o a sled?

very cool video steven thanks for sharing

-- It's made of wood. Real sturdy.--Chubbs Peterson

The S2S lumber is rarely perfectly straight. If you hold a straight edge to it, you will discover that unfortunately some of the boards will be bowed due to less than ideal storage or similar issues after they were surfaced. The edges are also not always 90. The machines at the mill are tuned regularly but sometimes they are slightly off.

-- Yves

It is milled already soyou could just run it thru the planer to final thickness.

-- mrg

smboudreaux: It depends on how flat the surfaced board is. A planer will not fatten a board that is not already flat, it will only reduce the thickness of the board. If the board is in the shape of a Pringle when you begin, then you will have a slightly thinner (possibly smoother) Pringle when you are finished sending it through your thickness planer.

I built a bookcase with three drawers (using one board for all three drawer fronts) and purchased the board already surfaced. It had some bad twist that needed to be taken out before the drawers could be dovetailed (or they wouldn’t fit properly). I used the method mentioned above and finished off with some hand tool work to ensure that the three boards were flat and true. The original board was 13/16th thick and I ended up with a board that was 5/8th thick, which worked just fine.

Hope that helped.

Steven

If all the lumber you buy is already planed and thicknessed to your specifications, then you can get along without those two tools and just use a hand plane for edge jointing. Makoof often just used a table saw for edge jointing, I did exactly this starting back in the 1970s when all I had was a table saw. It works perfectly well so long as you feed slow to get a fine surface. The only blades I had back then were the old school types with no carbide that I hand filed on my bench.

If you want to thickness your own lumber you will find a planer very helpful.
A jointer is enormously helpful when doing so very many things. It’s preps edges for glue up and when ripping thin strips you can take the lumber to the jointer for edge treatment in between rips
You can joint highly refined angles and even set it up to joint tapers and – - – I’m working on a design to use the Jointer to make barrel staves.

What you should know is that all the things you can do with a jointer and planer can all be done with hand planes.
The machines, when set up correctly, are a god send for those of us who don’t prefer to spend our time watching winding sticks and pushing a block across a surface. Some people like that. It’s all in what you want out of the journey.

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