For any woodworker, squaring and straightening boards is essential and you’ll need to think about investing in the best planer if you don’t want to perform this tedious task by hand.
Before anything else at all, we need to clear up some terminology because things can get rather confusing…
In the UK and Australia, a planer is what we in the US would term a jointer. That’s to say, it’s a tool for ensuring that boards have straight edges and flat surfaces.
Here in the US, a planer or thickness planer is a machine to make boards of uniform thicknesses.
To further muddy the waters, often you find the functions of both of these machines rolled into one unit known as a planer/thicknesser. This is a particularly handy machine.
So for the purposes of today’s best planer reviews, we’ll be looking at a variety of different options to ensure that there’s something for everyone.