Thickness planer

The thickness planer is the machine that performs the second operation in the wood preparation cycle: after the jointer has created a flat reference face, the thickness planer brings the opposite side parallel to that face and to the exact desired thickness. The workpiece is fed by drive rollers that push it against the rotating knives, removing a uniform layer and producing a constant thickness along the full length. Height adjustment is incremental or digital on more recent models. The result is a piece of stock with two parallel faces and a thickness accurate to a tenth of a millimetre—an essential condition for gap-free glue joints, CNC milling with uniform depth of cut, and the construction of composite panels.