Everything you need to know about thickness-planer snipe

hey everyone i'm ben and you're watching the snecker show and today we're going to learn all about thickness planer snipe such an exciting topic i know but if you have a thickness planer you probably had to deal with this at some point and if you're going to buy one later you will have to deal with this so it's good to learn everything you can about how to avoid snipe or at least reduce it as much as possible when i say snipe that's a woodworking term that refers to a situation where the cutter removes a little bit of extra material at the beginning or the end of a cut and it's not just applicable to thickness planters this can happen with several tools in your shop for example on your table saw if you're if you've got your saw blade here and your fence is leaning towards the saw blade in other words it turns in as you're facing it what happens is your piece of wood will get pinched gradually between the fence and the saw blade and at the end it'll snipe a little bit off to the end of your board so if you're seeing the little sawtooth marks on the ends of all your cuts you're getting table saw snipe on your jointer as you're pushing the board through if your outfeed table is too low in relation to the cutter head as the board passes over the end of the in-feed table and loses contact it'll drop down and snipe the end of your board on your jointer and it can happen on the thickness planer for a variety of reasons which we're going to look at today and those reasons can be related to the machine design itself it can be related to your materials or to operator error and there are fortunately solutions to all of these or at least ways to reduce it sometimes completely eliminate it so let's get started first we'll look at snipe caused by machine design portable thickness planers like this one have a stationary table and a movable cutter head body normally supported by two or more posts and this is different from the floor model planers that have a stationary cutter head body and a movable table they all have infeed and outfeed rollers separated by a cutter head in the middle now what happens is as the board enters the machine it makes contact with the in-feed roller and picks up the body just slightly rocks it and that lifts the cutter head in the process and that starts your in-feed snipe as the board continues through it hits the outfeed roller and that picks the body up level again and that marks the end of your infeed snipe the board keeps going and eventually loses contact with the in-feed roller and that causes the body to drop a little bit in the front and that marks the start of your end feed snipe you can actually determine the distance between your rollers and the cutter head well you can look in there but you can also measure the snipe at the beginning and end of a board the snipe on the first part of a board to exit the machine is going to show you the distance between your cutter head and the outfeed roller and the snipe on the last part of the board to exit the machine is going to show you the distance between the in-feed roller and the cutter head in other words if i can make that simpler the snipe on this end of the board tells you the distance on this side of the machine and the snipe on this end of the board tells you the distance on this side of the machine there are some things the manufacturer can do to reduce snipe and portable planers through design as was the case with my first sears craftsman planer many many years ago when people without cell phones roam the earth some planers had some kind of a lever to lock the body onto the height adjustment posts or the columns in the middle so it shifts less when the wood enters or exits this was minimally effective in my old craftsman planer but it still made a pretty noticeable improvement now recent models some of them have a feature where when the board goes in it hits a lever that will lock it automatically so you don't have to actually flip the switch i haven't owned one like that this one does not have that feature but the way that this dewalt dw735 addresses it first it has four four columns there are height adjustment screws and these are pretty beefy screws and there's really no play no detectable play in these and they have them spaced out a little bit wider this whole planer body is deeper than most thickness planers which are going to be somewhere around here and by spacing them out a little bit more it makes the rocking have less of an impact on the cutter head than if it were if they were in a little bit closer so that's one way that they can address it another thing that really seems to be helpful and i didn't know this until recently when i was filming the inside of my planer my rollers are spring-loaded so when the board enters and puts upward pressure the roller moves a little bit it gives a little bit and that's really beneficial because anything more than the minimum necessary downward pressure is counterproductive because downward pressure on the board results in upward pressure in the on the body and that's going to cause more of the movement that causes snipe i'm pretty sure most modern planers are going to have springs on the rollers but you can figure it out for sure by looking at a parts diagram or maybe even looking inside your owner manual this next thing is kind of a crossover between machine design and operator configuration and that is proper infeed and outfeed support on a portable planer even a deeper planer like this dewalt the board has relatively little contact with the table the longer and heavier the board is the more leveraged it applies downwards out here you might be wondering why i'm showing the inside instead of the outside if i'm talking about infeed and outfeed tables remember what i just said about the rollers being spring-loaded so what do you think happens when you get a large board with a lot of weight on the outside and it makes contact with one of those rollers and there's some downward pressure leverage on the outside see how easy it is for that roller to move so if you don't have proper infeed and outfeed support and you're planing heavier or longer boards they're going to push that roller up and give you a free ticket right into snipe build so let's see how that looked on the outfeed side yep definitely a little too much snipe there [Music] so all right let's see how we did the second time [Laughter] all right that looks pretty good you can see there's still a little bit of snipe there but i can hardly feel that and it's certainly a lot less noticeable with the wax marker i think that would probably sand out with little inconvenience i have seen a bit of discussion on the internet regarding whether these dewalt especially infeed and outfeed tables should be perfectly flush with the main table or sloped upwards some people seem to have some pretty strong opinions and usually the any associated evidence is just well i get less snipe when my tables are sloped or i got a buddy who says he gets less snipe when they're perfectly flat sometimes people will say well i got him in the box from the manufacturer and they were already sloped so they wouldn't send them that way if it wasn't supposed to be that way which is not true and other people say i got mine from the manufacturer and they were already perfectly flush with the table so that's obviously how they're supposed to be well there's some some merit to each side of the argument and hopefully i can address both of those normally i keep my infeed and outfeed tables flush with the main table except right now for this demonstration as you can see with this uh this level i have them raised up about an eighth of an inch on the in feet and the out feet are both raised up about an eighth of an inch and now i would like to present exhibit a for my side of the argument that is this three and a half inch thick piece of white oak there is no flexibility in this piece of wood whatsoever you could drive a truck over this what happens when you put it in the planer right now i have my planer set so that it's not even touching this there's there's nothing showing on the depth indicator it's not even touching the roller there's there's plenty of there's the roller plenty of room there for it to not touch the roller as i continue to go forwards watch the gap on the bottom the gap gets bigger because i'm riding uphill over here now eventually i'm going to get to the other side of the planer and i'll start to ride uphill on the outfeed table and now i get to a point where my planer or my my board rather is picked up 1 8 of an inch off of the table and it's going to start to make contact on those rollers what's supposed to happen in this situation if you have your table sloped and you're planing a larger piece of wood we already talked about the spring-loaded rollers so if this board pushes upwards and manages to move the rollers to the point where the board goes into the cutter head that means that you're actually going to scoop out the middle of this board and then when you get to the outfeed it's not going to remove any more material because it's dropped back down to the to the table surface so that's not really an ideal situation where you scoop out the board if the rollers don't move that means your infeed and outfeed tables are going to flex but since there's a little more metal on the side than in the middle of this table it's going to flex more in the middle so if you have your board on either side it might try to rock your board a little bit to one side or the other again that doesn't really seem like an ideal situation now to take this a step farther if i roll this back here and drop my depth to exactly or close to 1 16 of an inch now you can see that as i'm putting my board in for this 16 of an inch cut i'm already wedged because a 16th of an inch cut is not going to be able to happen through the entire pass because as as the board moves along it's going to want to push up on the body and it's going to max out and either max out the rollers or hit the the front of the planer here and i have a little bit of a restriction because i have the undersized shelix head in there so i can't go to a full eighth of an inch i can only plane just about a sixteenth of an inch before it actually hits the planer body but you can see that that's not really an ideal situation either so that's one side of it but there are reasons why somebody might see a benefit of of picking up their tables and we'll look at that next moving on to our next cause of snipe and that is feeding boards into the planer that aren't perfectly flat on the bottom this can result in a couple different types of snipe including twist snipe and bow snipe twist snipe as the name implies is caused by feeding in a board that's twisted on the bottom you can easily recognize this by snipe on opposing corners of the board notice how this sniped area here where the marker didn't make contact is on the opposite corner from here because as the roller pushes this flat it pushes this end up into the snipe zone and likewise when the roller is pushing over here it pushes this end up into the snipe zone bow snipe is very similar because as the roller is putting pressure over here it picks up this end of the board and as the roller is putting pressure over here it picks up this end of the board you can tell if it's a nice even bow because you'll have a nice straight line across like this and a pretty deep cut of snipe right here also it will rock when you put it on a flat surface with both twist snipe and bow snipe one way to reduce it is to pick up on the board as it's entering or exiting the planer to reverse the seesaw effect by putting energy up on this end of the board i put energy down on that end of the board and forces this to sit flat against the table this is why some people have their tables slightly elevated because it has the same effect of picking up a curved or bowed or twisted board at the end and putting this end flat as it's coming as it's losing contact with the roller in the front and hitting the cutter head so while this does work for addressing the issue of twist and bow snipe the real problem is not that the tables aren't elevated the problem is that the boards aren't flat on the bottom to begin with the approach that i would recommend to reduce snipe is to set your extension tables flush with the main table properly flatten your boards on the bottom before putting them through the planer and then when you're just stuck with a board that's either cupped or bowed give it a little extra upward support manually when it's entering and exiting the machine now just for fun let's take a look at a little bit of twist snipe in action i'll feed this block right here through the the planer and that's got a nice little bit of rock in it we can see it happening in slow motion let's see what we got here yeah that thing's just a mess there uh might be some snipe in the middle there but really we got the most snipe right here i can definitely feel that ridge that's a pretty significant chunk there that's more than could be sanded you'd have to plane that off and then over in the opposite corner of course there's a little bit more because of the rocking effect now as this was going through at most most of its past through the planer the the pressure from the rollers was holding it down like this but that last moment as you can see in the replay after it had already passed the knives was when this corner got pushed down by that point it had already been cut and sniped so there was nothing else that could be done how about i take a few minutes to flatten the bottom of this thing and then i'll push it through again and see what it looks like then i don't intend for this to be a jig video there are several ways that you can flatten the board but i'll just show one i just put together real quick at a scrap piece of baltic birch plywood that i know is pretty flat i know my planer tables are flat because i checked them again today and i just put a piece of scrap wood onto the end to make sure that the rollers don't suck the piece of wood forwards and then all i got to do is figure out where that high spot is and stick a shim under there as close to the edge as possible now i don't have any rock and i can send it through the planer [Music] i flipped it over and did the other side to flatten that out and then ran it through again on this side so let's see what it looks like and you can see there's still a little bit of snipe there but this is very little you can see how how narrow the gap is between with a marker made contact so i think this is a significant improvement another thing i noticed that i've never really seen before this is kind of cool but if you look closely you get almost like a little honeycomb pattern or something there that's from the the helical cutter head i guess the individual cutters inside that shelix cutter head leave tiny little scoops on the board well as you can see even after you've done everything you can to try to flatten out the piece of wood that you're pushing through the planer and you have your infeed and outfeed support set up properly you're still going to get just a little bit of snipe on these portable planers now this this dewalt model is pretty good as far as snipe goes the best one i've ever owned as far as snipe goes but you still get a little bit and most of the time you can just sand that out but if i'm doing like an edge glue up of a bunch of smaller boards you know 10 or 20 boards for like a cutting board or something like that that little fractional gap at the end of each board is really going to add up when you apply clamping pressure you clamp on one end and the other end is just going to open up so i like to get rid of snipe completely and that's why a long time ago i got in the habit of maintaining a snipe reduction bucket this is the easiest thing that you can do to deal with snipe i throw all kinds of stuff in here like here's a cut off from a two by four it'll work for a three quarter inch board that way or an inch and a half board that way here's a chunk of firewood i think that's great for uh some thicker boards the way this works is you just take your sacrificial board and you feed it into the planer first send your project board through right on its heels and that way your your rollers already have pressure on them by the time your project board enters the the sacrificial board has picked everything up and level it out now your project board starts out with no snipe in the beginning you grab your sacrificial board on the outfeed end and start it back to the beginning and that'll take care of any trailing snipe on the outfeed end or on the lagging end of your board so you end up with a project piece that has zero snipe [Music] [Music] as you might have noticed the board that i used for the sacrificial board was significantly narrower than the piece that i sent through so those rollers are rubber and they will flex a little bit so there might still be a little bit of snipe on here i don't see any right now i can barely see it barely feel it on the lagging end because i didn't use a sacrificial board there just so we can do a comparison let's see how this looks all right so if i push down a little bit there's just a very tiny little bit of snipe here but if you look at the actual gap between where the marker made contact that means that these two points are at the same plane whereas over here the gap is a little bit bigger that's still not bad at all if i just give this a few passes with a card scraper that was probably enough right there yeah see that's completely gone in some places and i could probably take a few more passes just to remove it from some of those other places there we go that's pretty much snipe free a little bit of sanding will just even this thing out perfectly and this is definitely not going to be noticeable in a glue up well the next thing that you as an operator can do to reduce snipe in your project is to plan your plane train when i say plan your plane train that means that if you're going to be working with multiple boards in the same project that will all be the same thickness and if you're like me and you have a lot of short pieces of wood in your shop just because that's what you generally cut up or have left over you plan it out so that you can do all of these boards in sequence the benefit to that is that the first board catches a little bit of snipe all of the other boards follow it almost as if the first one were a sacrificial board as i showed a few minutes ago and then the last board gets a little bit of snipe on the on the lagging end so that means out of all of those boards out of this whole stack right here i'll get a little snipe in the beginning a little snipe in the end everything else will be pretty much snipe free and that will be snipe free throughout the whole thing if i start and then with the sacrificial board i can just put another piece into this stack and work with that another thing to consider is that if you have any defects in some of the boards like this one and like this one these can be your leading and lagging boards so i would send this one through first so it gets the snipe on this side of that knot because i'm going to cut that off later anyway send through all the other boards and then send this one through last because i'm going to cut that piece off anyway that doesn't really matter now also when i say plan the plane train that means you want to have this train running smoothly doesn't just mean do it in sequence you got to actually think about where stuff's going to go especially if you have a one-speed planer so it's going to go through kind of quickly or if you're trying to run this one on the on the faster speed it can go off the track really really easily as you're you're trying to stack things up and feed boards around to this side and keep track of everything and then maybe stack them back up up on the top here for the next run it's best to plan it out in advance this is the first board i'm going to set it right here the second board is going to go through i'll set it right here that way i know that this side of the planer is kind of going to be off-limits because stuff will start bumping into other boards so after that i'm going to have to work on this side but i can keep stacking the boards up in this spot if you have another place maybe a little bench you can pull up alongside that's a good idea as well the trick is that you want to be able to quickly access your in-feed side and also your outfeed side and get things stacked up without having to do a whole lot of movement just in case something goes haywire [Music] now the last thing you can do which i wouldn't really recommend some people say you should just leave a little extra wood at the end of each board figure that's going to be cut off and and become waste i don't really like that option because i'm a hobby woodworker so my workshop is filled with small pieces of wood you know one foot two foot long i'm going to use it for something and if i lose two three inches off of each end of every board that i plane that's really gonna cut down my supply pretty quickly it makes more sense for a production shop where finished product is more valuable than having a you know a stack of little three-inch cut-offs that you're never going to use for anything but for my case i keep a box under my workbench that is filled with nothing but little inch and 5 8 cut-offs that are eventually going to get turned into an end grain cutting board like this so i like to reduce snipe on the end of the board because those little pieces that are left off after a project i'll use to cut into little blocks like this and eventually a cutting board if you want to see the process for this i'll put a link to that video down in the uh the description for for this video somewhere uh otherwise i think that brings us just about to the end so to recap see if i can remember the ways that you can reduce snipe are first to get a higher end planer or a snipe reducing planer instead of a like a harbor freight planer or something like that better quality planers are going to generally have less snipe next thing you can do is make sure that your in-feed and outfeed support is adequate especially if you're doing longer boards and make sure you support those boards as they're going in next you can make sure that the bottom of your boards are flat and you can either build a jig to flatten these boards you can build a long jig or a short jig a lot of different examples you know you can shim it up or use a router to flatten one side then flip it over or you can just use a regular jointer point is you want to make sure that those boards are flat as they're going along the surface the next thing that you can do is to use a sacrificial board keep a scrap bucket of just boards that you're willing to to put through your planer so that you can end up with nicer pieces of wood like this left over in the in your bucket i'd rather save this piece of purple heart than worry about some scrap piece of a two by four so the last thing i think is that you want to plan your plane and make sure that you got the sequence figured out if you have multiple boards you can do at the same time that you do it that way and oh i just thought of one more thing that will reduce snipe a guy at the gym i go to heard from a buddy who's a woodworking instructor at some school that if you watch the snekker show there's a 99 chance you're going to have less snipe from your thickness planer just a rumor but i'm pretty sure it's true thanks for watching

Channel: The Snekker Show

Views: 281,908

Keywords: DW735, thickness planer, DW734, snipe, woodworking, woodworker, DeWalt, Shelix, shelix, helical, carbide, dewalt, dw735, byrd tool, byrd tools, byrd

Id: wcOUKAxrTy0

Length: 25min 20sec (1520 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 26 2020