Thread: Handheld Planer (electric)

One step at a time.

Planers are a rather crude tool. It's extremely difficult (impossible for a beginner) to align adjacent cuts perfectly. Therefore you simply won't be able to create "finished" timber suitable for accurate joinery with these tools. They are, however, an essential tool for joiners and carpenters in their respective trades.

Get your timber accurately dressed and dimensioned at a joinery shop for a nominal charge.

If you still insist on purchasing a planer, then I have a left-field recommendation that will best suit your requirements. Almost all planers have an 82mm width of cut, however there's also some obscure brands that cut 75mm. Most of my planers are 82mm. However, I have a couple of older discontinued models of AEG that cut 102mm wide. Originally designed by Mafell (Germany's premier woodworking and carpentry tool brand, these are quality German made tools that are powerful, lightweight and use tungsten carbide "quick change" blades. I find them to be a quantum leap in usefulness above my other ELU, Festool and Metabo planers by virtue of their greater width of cut and much much safer than any other tool I've used in having a proper retractable guard that encompasses the cutterhead. AEG also produced these tools under their Atlas Copco and Milwaukee sister brands.

Hundreds of thousands of these tools have been sold over the years, and they are readily available on the continent by searching "Hobel or Elektrohobel AEG" on ebay.de, for example. Consumable parts are also readily avaliable: blades, belts, brushes and bearings from the same source, and also from the AEG/Milwaukee/Ryobi national service network in Australia.

As far as blade life is concerned, in clean softwood an edge will last literally hundreds of meters, less in hardwood or abrasive timbers. Contaminants like dust and dirt will substantially lessen life, as will embedded foreign bodies such as stones, nails etc. Tungsten Carbide is an extremely hard material, and as such tends to brittleness. It's easy to "gap" a pair of blades on a nail. These gaps can be marginally offset in relation to each other to enable you to continue working with an otherwise sharp pair of blades.

If you have table saw get a high tooth count quality blade and that will joint and thickness for you. For 100 mm stock pass through then turn the piece end over end to do the rest of the thickness. Or use a 12" TS.

You could also buy a router and make a router sled to plane and thickness.

Both these will need cleanup with a sander afterwards.

Another option is a drum sander like the 400-800 unit carbatec sells. You have to set it up and you may need to sand afterwards but no tearout on knots, difficult grain etc.

I'm in the process of cleaning up some troubled pine now and the drum sander has been marvelous. I've had trouble with tearout on the electra beckam planer thicknesser and am considering doing the work as much as possible on the TS and drum sander.

Do a search for threads on jointing and thicknessing on the TS and with a router to see details on the pros and cons.

I've got a hand held makita planer. Brilliant machine but not well suited to what your trying to do. You'd be better off with a hand plane straight edge and patience.

When you do buy a planer or thicknesser get a spiral head. I suspect straight blade machines will diminish in resale value dramatically in the next few years.

Thanks for the advice!

I wish I had a table saw - it's high on the 'wish' list, but I think out of reach for this project - again, I don't want to buy a real cheap one and be unhappy with it, but that leaves me looking for $1000....

I'll do a search on the router idea - that may work for me as well, I hadn't even thought of it to be honest (I guess that I why I am here asking...)

Ahh, yes. Thanks for all the advice. Further reading (which this pointed me too) finds lots of posts with people complaining about hand planers and not being able to use them. I have no doubt I will fall into that category.

I do really want to do all the work myself (it doesn't have to be perfect in the end - I know i am still learning and have significant limitations), I like the router and sled setup as well. This could work, and a router has so many more uses, I could afford to but a better one as a multi use tool

Thanks again. I won't jump just yet, but I am thinking the router will help.

Of course, maybe I will also leave these boards to season in the garage for a while, and go and buy some decent wood to work straight away with - this is my other option until I understand more! (but then, you don't learn much till you try, or so has been my experience)