How to Use a Planer

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Tim Gipson and I'm going to talk to you about how to use a planer. Now in this case I'm going to talk to you about a hand planer. Which is the most common type of planer that you will use. Of course there are power versions of it but the principles are going to be about the same. Now planers are used for several different reasons. In order to achieve a consistent uniform surface on the edge of a wood for when you are joining two wood pieces. You might use a planer when your house settles, occasionally you'll have a door that will catch on the bottom or catch on the top because that house settles at different rates and so openings can get a little out of a square. So the easiest way to correct that is to remove your door and then plane down the surface that is making contact so that the door will open and close more easily. Now some important things about setting up your planer is you have some adjustments up here which tilt this blade. So as you are looking at the blade as it sticks out to the bottom here, you can tilt it so that as the blade wears you can always keep it parallel to the surface of the plane. And then you also have an adjustment knob here which adjusts the depths of the blade as it comes out. Now when you are adjusting your blade you want it just below the surface of the planer so that as you are taking a shaving or you are working on your wood piece, you should get a very thin curled up peel when ever you run the planer across. And then you know that you have it set at the right level. Now also the peel should also be very uniform in it's thickness across it. If it's a little thinner on one side or thicker then you got a little camber to your blade so that you need to fix that. So once we are ready to use our planer we will set it on the surface and we will hold the front of it and hold the back of it and we want to make sure that we hold even pressure and then slide across your piece. Ok so again when you run your planer across see you should get a nice thin tight role of wood material and as you can see it's fairly uniform on the thickness all the way across so that way we know our blade it doesn't have a camber to it and isn't crooked and then also we are taking the right shaving. So when you are working with a planer you always want to set so that that blade is parallel and that you work with very thin pieces and take little shavings at a time. So I'm Tim Gipson and that's how to use a hand planer."