15 vs 20" planer?

[Cliff Addy]

This may be (and probably is) a silly question, but why would you choose a 20" planer over a 15" ? I'm having trouble conceiving of a job that would require a planer that wide.

Cliff

[Steve Nouis]

Door panels, small table tops for starters. Steve

[Cliff Addy]

But wouldn't you have jointed/planed the wood before glueup?

[John Keeton]

When I do a glue up on a panel, I face joint (join?) the wood to get a flat face, then plane to flatten the other face, but leaving the board thicker than finished dimension. Then I glue up the panel, trying to get all boards flush on one side. Then if I can get the whole panel through my 15" planer, I plane to final thickness in a couple/three days after the glue has completely dried. Would be nice at times to have a 20" planer!!

[John Thompson]

Ditto John K... by leaving the thickness a little proud you come off the planer with no ridge lines if your glue creeped, etc. I have a 20" and some days I could use one even larger. The majority of my chest of drawer sides average 20"-21" and tops even wider. So....

Comes in handy with work-bench tops also. If you have a 36" wide you build two 18" sides and plane them. Then make the final glue-up of the two sections where a few passes with a card scraper or low angle smoothing plane with account for any slight ridge or glue line left in the center. Saves a bunch of time with the hand plane.

Good luck...

Sarge..

[Paul Atkins]

I have a 20" Griz and rarely plane 20" stuff, but I have a 'sharp' side and a 'duller'. I rough out most stuff on one side and finish pass on the other.

[Peter Quinn]

Oh, I can think of plenty of uses for a 20" planer. I use a 24" daily at work and sometimes I wish it were bigger. You can certainly get by nicely with a 15" in a small shop or hobby shop, but that extra width can be very convenient. Its a rare panel that glues up PERFECTLY flush, and one pass through a planer is a whole lot quicker than hand tools or belt sanders. Many millwork items need not be perfectly flat, just flush, and some things like small counters would be hard to flatten over their length in any event so chances are they won't glue up perfectly flush.

The real jump up is not from 15" to 20", its from small shop planer to industrial planer regardless of width. Small shop planers have solid serrated in feed rollers, rubber out feed rollers, and a chip breaker. Bare bones really, thats what I have in the home shop. Real industrial planers have segmented in feed rollers and segmented chip breakers that allow stock of more varied thickness to be passed simultaneously. They typically also have a pressure bar on the out feed to reduce snipe which small shop planers lack, which helps with long boards that are not flattened. Not so important for small parts in short lengths.

[travis howe]

All I can say is this... if you can afford it and you have the room for it...go for it.

It'll come in handy...sometime, somewhere...

[Cliff Addy]

Well, I can certainly afford it. I could afford to spend $4-5K on a planer if I wanted. I just don't want to spend money without a good reason. Maybe I'd be better off going with a 15" and use the extra money towards a good 24 sander.

[Jim Foster]

This is what I'm doing. I have a Performax 22-44 Pro and I'm upgrading planers to a 15." I pretty much have the room I need in the shop and I think it gives me the opportunity for more flexibility and less sanding.

Well, I can certainly afford it. I could afford to spend $4-5K on a planer if I wanted. I just don't want to spend money without a good reason. Maybe I'd be better off going with a 15" and use the extra money towards a good 24 sander.

[Matt Benton]

I worried about this as well, debating between a 10 year old Grizzly 20" from 2000 and a practically new 15" Powermatic. Each was around $800.

I ended up with the Powermatic. If I had a production shop, it would probably save time to do rough dimensioning, glue up, and then run the whole panel through the planer to get to final dimension, but as a hobbiest, it shouldn't be much harder to spend the extra time getting the glue up right the first time...

[Jeffrey Makiel]

I've found that planing a glue up can result in terrible tear out in one of the glued up boards in the panel. Often, my primary concern with a glue up is to match grain pattern, and sometimes this results in boards with opposite flowing grain on their surface.

Perhaps this is why many commercial shops use large oscillating belt sanders to even the surfaces to final thickness. From what I've read, helical indexed cutterheads may solve this problem for the home shop. But, a 20" helical head ain't cheap.

-Jeff

[Mike Cruz]

I have found that it is not only about being able to plane something as wide as 20", but two other things: I have always liked to feed boards in diagonally so you get less tear out and less snipe; also, 20 inch blades give you much more surface area, keeping your blades sharper longer by staying cooler and just plain old giving you more edge to dull. Think of it this way, if you had 6 inch boards, you could put one on the left and one on the right in a 15" planer, but in a 20"planer, you could feed 3 in. Personally, I hate changing the blades. The less I have to do it the better.

[Rod Sheridan]

Hi Cliff, I actually downsized my planer from 14" to 12" last year when I went from a General to a Hammer jointer/planer combo.

I guess because I never plane completed panels, 12" is more than adequate for me.

Now going from an 8" General to a 12" Hammer jointer, now that's sweet!

Regards, Rod.

[GERALD HARGROVE]

I was in the market for a new planner a few months ago. A freind had a nice 15" and he liked it, but as soon as he got it home and started working with it, he ran into needing a wider planer. For just a couple hundered more than what he paid, I got the 20". Just remember, a 20" planer weighs quite a lot.