A planer’s cutterhead determines how it cuts wood, how much noise it makes, and what maintenance looks like. A straight-knife head uses a few long blades across the width of the board. A spiral-style head uses many small, staggered carbide cutters. Both can produce smooth, accurate stock when set up well; the difference is how…
When a board needs one reliably straight edge, a jointer and a router table can both do the job—but they do it in different ways. A jointer is the faster, more direct machine for jointing lumber. A router table is more flexible and may be the better purchase if you also need to cut profiles,…
What the names mean A benchtop planer is a portable thickness planer: you set a finished thickness, feed a board through, and the cutterhead removes wood from its top face. It normally has a 12- to 13-inch capacity and weighs roughly 60 to 100 pounds. A stationary planer is a heavier floor-standing machine, often with…
A jointer and a planer both remove wood, but they solve different problems. A jointer makes one face flat and one edge square to that face. A thickness planer makes the opposite face parallel to the face already flattened. For a rough board that is twisted or bowed, joint it first, then plane it to…
A rough-sawn board is usually too uneven to run straight through a thickness planer. The planer makes faces parallel; it does not reliably flatten a twisted or bowed board. A band saw can remove excess thickness or rip a board to width, but it does not create a flat reference face either. For most stock…
What you’re trying to fix A rough board’s edge is often wavy, bowed, or not square to its face. The goal is to make one edge straight enough to guide against a table saw’s fence. A jointer is built to do that directly. A table saw can produce a straight edge too, but it needs…
A standard rip fence can guide a bandsaw cut, but it does not guide a resaw cut in quite the same way a table-saw fence guides a rip. A bandsaw blade can drift as it passes through thick stock, and the fence needs to let you correct for that drift. A dedicated resaw fence is…
What matters in a 14-inch saw Resawing means cutting a board along its thickness to make thinner boards or veneer. A 14-inch band saw can do this well, but the wheel diameter alone does not tell you how useful it will be. Check the maximum cutting height, motor, frame stiffness, blade guides, and whether the…
Thin veneer strips are usually easier and safer to make on a band saw, but a table saw can do the job when the stock is straight, the saw is stable, and the setup controls both the workpiece and the offcut. The main hazards are a narrow strip pinching between the blade and fence, or…
Long boards are awkward on a table saw because the table supports only a short part of the work. The unsupported end can dip, rise, or twist as you feed it. That can spoil the cut, pull the board off the fence, or cause a dangerous bind. The fix is support that holds the board…