Thread: Snipe saga

This is the most common one: https://woodgears.ca/jointer/planer_snipe.html

I remember now and I recall that someone tried putting locks on the shaft or head to try and stop the head moving but it seemed to me to be a lot of trouble to go to and easier to allow extra and cut the sniped section out.

One tip to help avoid or at least mimimize waste from snipe is to feed boards continuously through the thicknesser so that they "overlap" sideways i.e. not end to end, and offset from board to board. This helps to keep continuous pressure on the infeed and out feed rollers and prevents the head movement on all but the leading end on the first board and trailing end on the last board. Not a lot of use for boards wider than half the thicknesser width though, so you have to resort to feeding end to end & hoping for the best.

Of course this works best for the final sizing pass if the boards are all the same thickness as they go through the thicknesser. I usually bring all boards individually down to the one over size thickness then take them down progressively in a continuous flow to final thickness.

The old trick of feeding boards through on "the angle" makes the boards "longer" on the diagonal and reduces the "usefull" length of the snipe. For short boards I feed them through on "the angle" and well overlapped and I will often use a piece of scrap or sacrificial waste timber (borer holes or blue stain etc) as first and last board to eliminate snipe all together on the good boards..

One thing I have noticed on my H&F thicknesser is that there is a slight difference in thickness of boards thicknessed on the left to right right sides. Must be a slight taper between cutter head & bed platten.

This might be the one Chris is referring to.

Originally Posted by Treecycle

This might be the one Chris is referring to.

Got it in one, I need a tutorial in searching on forums, all I get is a heap of hits with no way to sort them.

Loved sidewz's metal collars on the columns, now how the heck am I supposed to get my hands on something like that?

Originally Posted by NathanaelBC

Any idea how to remove the infeed/outfeed tables altogether?

They're now redundant with my melamine bed, but I can't figure out how this hinge pin works and how to remove it:

The C shaped cross section of the pin is just jammed in there.
Normally an appropriately sized punch with a shoulder is used to just knock the pin out.
You might find a regular fat head punch can do the same thing.

Originally Posted by Chris Parks

Got it in one, I need a tutorial in searching on forums, all I get is a heap of hits with no way to sort them.

So do I. Sometimes I am lucky and other times I get nothing. Not sure what I do differently.
Does anyone know if there is a tutorial on here anywhere?

I just asked YouTube and found this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmaFIJCz8AQ

Another fix I saw somewhere was to cut some small wedges and push them between the cutter head and the table when you are getting near the thickness you want. Leave them in there and wind the cutter head down for your next cut and keeping doing that until you achieve the thickness you want. The casting of the cutter head will crush into them.
The purpose of these wedges is that they support the cutter head from underneath preventing it from tilting as the rollers go on and off the timber as was explained by Mathias on Woodgears.
Just make them out of soft wood such as Pine and only about 6mm thick. If they are too hard or too thick it will require too much force to make the cutter head crush into them.

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