Take a tour of my Planer
Interesting Characteristics
I have a floor-standing 15" Grizzly Planer with a sprial cutter head, it's a real powerhouse that can plow through the hardest exotics with ease. Most wookworkers when asked "what is the most important machine in the shop" will inevitably choose the tablesaw. While I clearly consider the tablesaw to be very important, my machine of choice is the planer. There is no other machine in the shop that easily allows you to mill lumber to dimension... any dimension. I rarely use the typical 3/4" thickness you find in surfaced lumber in my projects. I find that thickness very uninteresting and frankly downright boring. I usually buy roughsawn lumber, it's cheaper per board foot than surfaced and rarely have I seen surfaced lumber that was truly flat and free of twist and wind. Of course I am implying that the planer can be used to remove twist, wind and make truly flat lumber. Yes I am! Most woodworkers seem to believe this is not possible, but I can tell you, I can get an 8ft long 12" wide roughsawn board with any sort of twist, even a cup completely straight and dead flat, no jointer required. How? See below ...
Commentary
While I do own a jointer, it's small one that I use just for edge jointer. I have no use for face jointing to flatten lumber. I have a technique that uses just the planer to remove twist, wind and cup from even the most difficult boards. The procedure involves first planing with the offending board on a sled. The sled, which is nothing more that 3/4" MDF shelf board has stops on front and back to prevent it from sliding around. Next I have a couple of packs of playing cards. With the cards, I shim the underside of the board (between the board and the sled) at all the gaps. I shim until the board no longer wobbles. Running this 'shimmed' board and sled setup through the planer fools the planer into thinking the underside of the board is already flat and therefore planes the top surface to match. Now you have a true flat surface, the top one. You can now plane the opposite side to match. I've been using this "sled and play card shimming" technique successfully to flatten lumber for many years. It's just one of reasons the planer is my machine of choice in the shop.
For a detailed walk-thru of individual workstations in my shop, click on any of the links below.