Should You Have A Thickness Planer In Your Shop?

Saving time
Best of all, a home shop thickness planer will save your time while offering the potential of better results. Commercial planers are built to run in situations where production speed is more important than surface quality. As a result, they may not always produce the high-quality surface finish you need for your best work.

You'll also save time during the assembly portion of your project. For example, instead of using sandpaper to attain smooth, even surfaces on stock after joinery, you can get the surface quality you want before you begin joining the wood together. In this way, the thickness planer will take many of the unpleasant surprises out of joining your project components together, increasing the many pleasures of your woodworking hobby in the process.

If, for instance, you're making stiles and rails for cabinet doors, a thickness planer will trim all your pieces to exactly the same thickness, letting you concentrate on joining them together professionally, knowing that you started with equally thick stock. That means your thickness planer will go a long way toward not only increasing the scope and quality of the projects you build, but also increasing the joys and pleasure you get from working with wood.

What it won't do
Still, a thickness planer is NOT a cure-all for all the variations Mother Nature can throw into a single piece of wood. When used in combination with a jointer, it can remove some deviations in straightness...but you'll still have to pay close attention to choosing the stock that's as straight and true as possible. Furthermore, a planer is not a stand-alone tool for the home shop...it simple prepares wood for further processing with other machines and hand tools.

Final Thoughts
The question remains...do you need a thickness planer in your shop? Just keep in mind that you really don't have to be a highly-skilled craftsman to use one. In fact, a planer is one of the tools you can use in your quest to becoming more skilled. It makes working with all kinds of solid wood a lot easier, less expensive and certainly more satisfying. Based on what it's designed to do, decide for yourself how the Shopsmith Thickness Planer will fit into the total scheme of your power tool woodworking shop.