Quote Originally Posted by Mark Bolton View Post
Imho there is no way edge planed material is going to compare to any shaper/molder based result. The finished width will of course be consistent over its length but the planer option does virtually nothing to further straighten the workpiece. A long fence (shaper or jointer) far exceeds the capabilities of a short planer bed and additionally with proper setup the shaper feeder will not exert enough force on the piece being edged to flatten a bow out of the workpiece. A planers feed rollers are going do do exactly as they do with a face planed board and squeeze it down flat, thickness it, and when it comes out the other end its just going to spring back to where it was.

With light feeder pressure the workpiece is straightened just like it is on a jointer if you present the workpiece with the crown out. Edge squareness is a given.

Im not saying edge planing/sandingg is not acceptable for certain operations, it surely is. But in the time it takes me to crank the handwheel on the planer down to 6" to feed a half a dozen 1x6s' on edge through the planer, I can stick a back fence on the shaper and be done.

Mark, I would disagree but again it depends on the planer. My Martin planer has a bed length of about 50”, no bed rollers to mar the wood or cause snipe, high height accuracy side to side, digital readout and powered up and down so going from 1/8” to 10” quickly is no problem. With the Tersa head cut quality is the same as the four sider or any of my insert shaper heads. I don’t count on the planer doing any straightening. Material needs a straight and square edge going in. We get this usually with the jointer because we are already there facing, but could be done on the SLR or even the sliding saw.
Seems like for the shaper- outboard method to be effective in a shop would need to be a dedicated setup especially for the many times just a few boards need to be edged. When we had our straight knife 16” planer it was limited for keeping square on height and cut quality. With this planer we did use the shaper method at times especially for face frames where surface quality needs to be high and edges square and crisp for joinery.


I prefer to work with hit and miss material but a lot of times only rough is available in some species. We either rough crosscut first or straighten on the SLR first depending on the job. Parts are ripped ¼” oversized if going through the S4S, a little less if going to the planer. Most parts are faced unless it’s something like running house trim. The S4S machine has a 80” infeed table for straightening edges and faces (like using a power feed on a jointer) but we still hand face on the jointer critical parts like door stiles and the such.