No-fail Routines for Jointing and Planing

Because they work in a similar fashion to remove stock from the face or edge of a board, the roles of the jointer and planer often cause confusion. Both help flatten and square up lumber, but they have distinct and different jobs. A jointer flattens one face of a board and squares up an adjacent edge—but it can’t bring that board to consistent thickness. That’s the planer’s job. So a jointer and planer work together, much like love and marriage in the old song: You shouldn’t have one without the other.

Flat, square stock begins on the jointer, so let’s start there.

Jointing: a fundamental step for woodworking success

How a jointer works

As you can see in the Jointer Cutaway [below], infeed and outfeed tables straddle a cylindrical cutterhead. The infeed table sits just lower than the top arc of the knives; the outfeed table sits flush with the top arc.

As you feed a workpiece into the cutterhead, the knives remove any portion of the board below the plane…