Causes of planer snipe on small thickness planers![]()
As the board exits the planer, the infeed roller runs off the end of the board. The rubber rollers apply quite a bit of downward pressure to the board, and as the roller rolls off the board, there is a lot less upward pressure against the head assembly from the roller, so the whole head assembly typically moves down a tiny bit. The same thing happens at the start of the board when the board starts to engage the outfeed roller.
This type of snipe can be avoided by feeding boards behind each other so that they touch and the roller never rolls off the boards (see here), although it can be hectic keeping the planer fed while picking up the pieces coming out of it at the same time.
My old delta planer doesn't have a head lock and it only has two screw columns, but it occurred to me that if I were to insert spacers between the planer head and the table and press the head down against those spacers, that might have the same effect.
The spacer bars are only good for one thickness, but I figure if I had to repeatedly plane boards of the same thickness, this could actually be a useful feature.
The rubber infeed and outfeed rollers are spring loaded and only press down so hard, so they won't prevent the board from tilting up a little bit. You can avoid this type of snipe by making sure the board doesn't sag down going in and coming out of the planer. A longer table, or folding tables on the jointer also prevent this type of snipe.
I got this planer on sale for just $200, half as much as I paid for my old Delta planer back around 1998. As far as I can tell, it's a better planer than the Delta. Part of the reason I bought it was so I could disassemble it to for the cutter head which I used to build a 12" jointer. But with this being a better planer than my old Delta planer, I disassembled the Delta planer instead.
For large cast iron planers, typically, the head is fixed in place and the table moves up and down. This means the head won't move, but sometimes the table will move or flex because of the varying amounts of downward pressure applied by the feed rollers. Some large thickness planers have rollers in the table. This makes the boards less likely to get stuck, but the rollers in the bed can also be a source of snipe. Worse yet, when planing softwoods, sometimes the rollers get gummed up with pine tar, which will later mark up the board, or cause a sort of periodic snipe as the bumps on the rollers push the board up. So rollers in the table are not always a good idea.
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