Can you use Power Hand Planer instead of benchtop planer?


Alex Goncharov

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Hey Alex, the hand held planer is useful but incredibly finicky. It can quickly reduce the thickness of stock but has a very small footprint. It can be very tricky to keep the tool from gouging because of that small footprint. I would not compare them to each other in the same category.

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First Post!! Welcome Alex!  Good place to hang out.  I'm +1 with Shaffer.  I have a hand held and it's good to reduce something when the final thickness is not critical or the stock is not too wide or it's just good to hog off some material but If the money's there, I'd say get a bench top.

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+2.   As far as woodworking is concerned, they are useful in a few, limited applications.   If I have board that is too wide for my jointer, I will use the power planer to knock down the high spots so it will be stable enough to run through my thickness planer.  But I only do this if I have plenty of margin for error.   I wouldn't do this on a 4/4 board, before I know it I would be down to nothing!  I also use it to clean up reclaimed stock.     It is really difficult to use those for final dimensioning, it is more of a rough tool.  

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You can but I certainly wouldn't unless I wanted to plough a furrow thru some stock. I think I still have one somewhere. It is difficult to keep square to a face with the fence. Just a bunch of c..p in my humble opinion. Save your money and get a bench top or a floor mounted jointer.

 

BTW that Dewalt planer is used to thickness the stock (we call the machine a thicknesser in England). The handheld planer is a motorized hand plane.

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Those little handheld "planers" are really more akin to what a jointer does...except they don't do it very well.  Tom's point is the most important...a planer creates a flat face parallel to the other...those little planers won't do that.  Even if you miraculously achieve two flat faces on a board, it's almost impossible to avoid creating a wedge.  I know some people use them for this or that, but personally I can't think of a tool that would be a bigger waste of drawer space in my shop.

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I know of one guy who took his turned it upsidown and built a frame and fence for it. He used it for jointing but he builds miniture,s and carvings so he squaring up small boards like 1/2 inch thick 2" wide. He said a full size one had too much power for his tiny pieces this way he had better controll.

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