Hi Duayne,

Stairs need a big capacity machine.

Stari parts are often thick and long and heavy.

In our shop we have a 600mm wide planer so that we can glue up steps and then run them through the planer to flush up and calibrate before sanding.

The power of the machine depends on the width you need to plane and 600mm requires a lot of HP.

If you have a wide belt sander you can use it to calibrate and sand in on operation and the thickness planer will only be used for individual boards that should exceed 300 to 400mm wide. In this case you could consider a smaller thickness planer.

The type of machine that’ll best suit you will depend on:

• The number of people working in your shop and the number of parts that will be running through the machine.
• The required depth of cut that will be dependant on the rough surface of the raw material.
• The required width, that will depend on whether you are using the planer to calibrate wide panel or not.

All the best,

Ness

Hi Duayne,

The type of thickness planer will depend on the type of work you’ll be putting through the machine.

What sort of jobs will you be doing?

Ness