A benchtop thickness planer is the one machine in a small shop that will not sit still. It wants to be on a bench when you are jointing edges, and on wheels when the job moves to someone else’s driveway. That tension is exactly why the best planer stands for mobile shops have become the … Read more
If you want one machine that flattens rough lumber to a dead-even thickness without eating your whole shop floor, the DEWALT DW735X is the best benchtop planer most people should buy. It has a 19-3/4 inch cast aluminum base with folding tables, a two-speed gearbox that lets you trade feed rate for finish, and an … Read more
The DEWALT DW735X is the best thickness planer for hardwood in . Its 15 amp motor pulls wide boards through dense species without stalling, the three knife cutterhead at 96 or 179 cuts per inch leaves a finish you can skip sanding on, and the automatic carriage lock takes most of the snipe out of … Read more
If you have ever pulled a curl of curly maple across a thickness planer and watched the surface shred into fuzzy patches, you already know the frustration. That is not a dull blade problem, and no amount of extra sanding will hide it properly. The best planer blades for figured wood are the ones that … Read more
A door that binds in its opening will not be fixed by a screwdriver or a set of shims. The fix is removing a few thousandths of an inch of wood from the latch side, the hinge stile or the bottom, and a handheld electric planer does that faster and flatter than almost anything else … Read more
A 12 inch benchtop planer is the machine that turns a warped, rough-sawn board into a dead-flat component you can glue up. For furniture making it is the difference between two case sides that meet flush and two that do not. Tabletops, drawer fronts, table legs and glued-up panels all have to be identical in … Read more