[Spitterkat]

Hi,

Im green as to woodoworking, and I was curious as to why someone would need a planer / thicknesser (or bench planes for the same purpose). When you go to the timber merchant, isnt it already planed?
The other question is, lets say you buy rough sawn wood or your wood warps and you need to plane some off to get it straight / square. Assuming you bought a few inch thick boards, how do you end up with boards of a similar thickness? do you end up with bits of wood with a weird thickness (e.g. 17mm) and just plane everything to that thickness?

Cheers

Topic

[BFgeronimo]

#2028916

There are lots of answers for a lot of circumstances. Yes, timber you buy at the store is generally planed and uniform, and if it happens to be what you want and need, then good. But as you go on into more in-depth work, you will find that the cookie-cutter sizes become less and less satisfactory. As far as various odd sizes and getting them uniform, again it depends on what you are needing. You can certainly plane a 1″ board down to half inch, but usually you are just wasting materiel. In such a case, you would cut it down close and plane it to exact size. This helps ensure it is flat and removes tool marks. Or, like you asked about, you may have several pieces of timber that you want to use on a particular project that are all wonky sizes and just work them to a uniform thickness, regardless of what that may be. At least for me, that comes up fairly often.

It comes down to not being limited to what Lowe’s offers off the shelf. Do this stuff long enough and you will have a barn or shed full of timber in non-standard size and you can pick out something and say “Aha, this will be perfect for that.”

As far as planing and straightening, Josh has a good video on that.

OWOF

[BFgeronimo]

#2028917

Another part of the answer in regard to using a thickness plane. If you are using one of those loud, messy, awful things (just kidding, but not really. I sometimes sneak down to my dad’s shop to use his), one side of your board needs to be straight and flat before you feed it into the monster or else you will just end up with the same twists on the other side, so you would use hand planes first.

OWOF

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