How to use an electric hand planer on wide boards?

Achieving correct thickness is essential when processing wood, especially for furniture making and for manufacturing structural wood pieces. ‘Planing” is when you correct thickness errors in processed timber or boards or adjust a wooden board or beam to the desired thickness. 

A hand plane is a small tool that can work just as well as an industrial-grade planer in the hands of a skilled woodworker.

When you know how to use a power hand planer on wide boards you will be able to flatten and level wider surfaces of wood.

Your options for reducing the thickness on wide boards

There are plenty of ways in which you can better reduce board thickness and make wood smooth faster. These range from simple and affordable tools to bigger more complex and expensive options. Let’s go over what’s available.

1. Standard electric hand planer 

You can make use of only a standard electric hand planer for planing wide boards.

A small tip for improving how to use an electric hand planer on wide boards is to sand the surface well afterward with a belt sander to blend the lines between each sweep.

2. The Makita KP312

This is the biggest hand electric planer available, made for planing bigger wider boards. With a powerful 15-amp motor the bigger base and blades make it the best electric hand planer for smoothing wide boards.

3. The Makita 1806B

The next size down is the Makita 1086B. Nearing 11-amps, this Makita planer is a versatile and more affordable alternative to the KP312 and shines in smaller to medium-scale work. Go with this If you don’t need extra width but still need a large powerful motor that’s a little easier to control. 

4. Belt Sander

Belt sanders can function a lot like hand planes, except it’s better to use them when you’re finishing a workpiece.

Belt sanders are good options to go with if you feel like you need to make additional passes to get a perfectly flat and even board. Especially if the planer you used first does not reach the full width of your board in a single pass.

5. Wood router

A wood router can be used to get a perfectly flat surface on any board if you set up the right rig.

Using a hanging guide rail [1] you can use a wood router to perfectly flatten a table or wide timber board. However, it is going to be much slower than the other methods mentioned.

If you have reasonable flatness, but humps caused by using a planer with the blades not set correctly parallel. Or from over-sanding, you can use this method to achieve perfect flatness again.

6. Thickness planer

These are basically automated board-processing tools that come ready to go. Those serious about their woodworking invest in a thickness planer at some point as they are some of the best at producing and maintaining consistent results.  

Do you need to split/rip wide boards down?

No. There’s no need to break down your piece into smaller pieces. A hand planer will work fine even with any wideness of a board [2]. Of course, it might require you to make additional passes if the board is wider than your planer’s blade width. 

To add, splitting the board up adds more work as you’ll need to make sure that the thickness of the split pieces is identical to avoid a mismatch. And you would have to glue the boards back together perfectly flat.

Here’s what you need to know about strong and lightweight woods.

How to get the wood board perfectly flat after planing by hand?

For extremely long and wide pieces, usually in the form of single wooden slabs, getting them perfectly flat requires a little extra work beyond just hand planing.

Using a wood router on a hanging guide allows you to get imperfections that are too small for a planer’s blade to correct.

Make a jig that acts as a rail for the router and position it perpendicular to the workpiece. Move it along following the jig’s guide until you cover the entire piece to remove humps and any excess material.

But in most cases, you can use a belt sander, planer, and an aluminum straight-edge to monitor flatness.

How to get boards reasonably flat after using electric hand planers?

Use a belt sander. Since belt sanders were designed to quickly smoothen wooden surfaces, using a belt sander to scruff out anything that your electric hand planer might have missed will ensure decently flat boards.

Of course, you have to still make sure that you’ll be using the sander with the piece completely leveled, this will further reduce errors and avoids running the risk of getting skewed thickness. Also, make sure your passes with the sander are even strokes.

Should you use an extra-wide electric hand planer? 

If you need to know how to use an electric planer on a tabletop or a really wide board, and the job demands it, then yes. deciding whether to go with a regular-sized hand planer or an extra-wide one really does depend on how you will tackle your projects. And how often you will be doing a job like this. 

Using an extra-wide planer on wider pieces will help reduce work time and effort on large pieces, while it can be less effective and cumbersome when size doesn’t matter. 

The Makita KP312 vs The Makita 1806B

The Makita KP312 is larger and near industrial-grade in terms of performance. This hand planer was designed to be a workshop powerhouse and is better suited for heavier applications that usually involve larger and tougher pieces.

It’s basically the power of a thickness planer without the constraint of a box.

In comparison, though the Makita 1806B is no pushover, its smaller frame and lower output make it better for general and medium-scale projects when power is needed. 

Both are great, but you’d basically want the KP312 if you’re going for higher investment and have wider work demands. The 1806B is a better semi-portable model and is a good all-arounder for professional serious planing work.

What is the beauty of a thickness planer?

A thickness planer is what you use to get perfect boards – flat, even, and accurately thickened pieces. With a thickness planer, rarely would you need to use other tools to do further corrections, if at all!

For those who are already scaling up their woodwork, a thickness planer will greatly boost productivity as it easily produces a consistent stream of perfect-dimensional wood.

When to use a thickness planer?

Those who have a regular delivery schedule to meet or higher production margins should consider investing in a thickness planer since it’s a tool that consistently produces great quantities of flat and accurate pieces.

Besides keeping up with greater project demands, you can also use a thickness planer to even out relatively important pieces before finish or to correct finished pieces. 

Dos and don’ts when hand power planing wide boards

Now you know how to use an electric hand planer on boards that are wide, here’s what you should be cautious about.

Dos

• Do secure the piece on a flat surface. Make sure it doesn’t wobble. 
• Do plane from high spots going down. You can use a self-made marking gauge to transfer surface flatness onto the workpiece.
• Do fine-tune flatness using winding sticks. You know flatness is even when both sticks are parallel to each other.   

Don’ts

• Don’t attempt using a hand planer stationary, It’s better to guide a hand power planer even if it’s smaller due to the added control, safety, and precision.
• Don’t rip the workpiece unless you mean to process it through a thickness planer. 
• Don’t cross stroke directions. If you start back-and-forth, then just go back-and-forth. But you can alternate what end you start planing from for a more even finish.

Conclusion

Thickness plays a big part for woodworkers, especially for those that are expected to manufacture other objects. The thickness of a piece affects its strength, durability, and even its aesthetic appeal.

There are many ways in which thickness is controlled and corrected. A hand power planer is great for working with a wide range of differently-sized pieces, while a thickness planer easily makes quick work for a lot of larger and wider boards the fit.

And if your want to know how to use manual hand planers for light planing, here’s how.