Thickness planer

A thickness planer consists of three elements: a cutter head which contains the cutting knives; a set of rollers which draw the board through the machine; and a table which is adjustable relative to the cutter head to control the resultant thickness of the board.

Some portable thickness planers differ slightly in that the table is fixed and the cutter head/feed roller assembly is adjusted.

[1]: 1 Industrial thickness planers are capable of accepting very wide boards and removing large amounts of material in a single pass.

The knives remove material on the way through and the out-feed roller pulls the board through and ejects it from the machine at the end of the pass.

This manifests as a deeper cut on a short section of the board at either end and is caused by incorrect feeding or misalignment of the in-feed or out-feed tables, or an unnecessarily high setting of the rollers recessed in the surface of the in-feed table.