: Paul, if you are using a planner for lots of wood projects then
: they are a definite "must have" tool.

Depends on the woodworking projects. With hardwoods and furniture making this is definitely the case. A person using softwoods for construction, or someone making lots of plywood projects could spend their life never using a thickness planer. Many people need just a few boards broought down to a given size and they rip them, or resaw them on their tablesaw, then use a hand plane, sander, or powered jointer planer to get the board smooth and the correct size.

: If you are using
: it just for kayaks you don't need it. I have a 15" planner
: that I never use, at least for kayaks.

Strangely enough, I bought my surface planer after struggling with the strips on my canoe. I hated all the sanding and wanted a way to get my strips more uniform in thickness before gluing them together. I hated all the dust I made with my belt sander. It works, mind you, but way too messy for me. A hand plane would have been neater.

: If you are making your
: own strips. Set up a router table with two laminate trim routers
: to cut the bead and cove at the same time. This automatically
: sizes all your strips to the same width.

What you are suggesting, I believe, is that he get two routers mounted on one table, instead of a planer. In this case, the less-expensive routers designed for trimming laminate. By putting a cove-cutting bit in one router, and a bead-cutting bit in the other, and setting the routers a certain distance apart, he would shape the edges of the strips. If he was cutting his strips from boards with rough (unplaned) faces this would give him strips with rough edges, and the milling process owuld tame those edges and give strips of uniform width. He could do the same thing with one router, and 2 passes of each strip. The first pass with the router shapin the rounded ( and more durable) bead edge. Then after changing cutters on the router he would put each strip through for a second pass to cut the recessed cove shape on the other side of the strip. Twice the time, but no time spent on making a double-router table, and half the cost to buy just one router instead of two.

Problem here is that unless the strips are all the same thickness those routed edges will be off center. The usual cure for this is to plane the strips first--so he's back to needing a thickness planer--or something that will do the same job.

Several cures for that problem: the first would be to set up a rock-solid approach to cutting the strips in the first place. Infeed and outfeed support along with fingerboards pressing the board consistently against the saw's rip fence. Ad to that a straight edge to check that the board has a perfectly straight edge running along that fence. Someone could remove high spots with a hand plane. It slows the ripping process, but gives better precision.

While we like ot use thin kerf blades, or even 7 1/4" blades from hand-held circular saw on the table saw, it might be worthwhile to use a "planer" blade on the tablesaw. You would get a smoother surface on the face of the strips--smooth enough that further planing would not be necessary--but the wider kerf turns more of the wood into sawdust. you would get about 12 strips from a 1x6 instead of 14. Add $15 to the lumber cost but save on buying a new tool and save on the time to run strips through a second process.

A router with a 1" long (or longer) flush-cutting or straight bit can be used instead of a planer to get all the strips to the same thickness. After ripping all the strips, send them through the router to get one face smoothe, then move the fnece a hair closer to the cutter, flip the strips and pass them through a second time to smooth the other face. If you are goin to do bead and cove edges, then change cutters and make those cuts on the 3rd and 4th passes.

similarly, there are other machining processes which can be used get smooth faces on the strips and to bring them to a uniform thickness.

In the absense of a router one can buy a flat sanding disk (looks like a sawblade with no teeth) for the tablesaw, and run the strips past that to snad them to size and smooth them. Again, lots of fingerboards; the strips tend to lift off the table as they pass the far edge of the sanding disk.

A sanding drum mounted on a drill press, or a 3-blade shaperhead mounted on a radial arm saw or other options. They work, but I'm not fond of them.

Mounting a hand-held electricc power plane on two rails (pieces of strips) of the correct thickness will do the same job as a full-size surface planer, but without the power feed. Trick here is find a good way to mount the plane. You can get inexpensive planes for this process from Harbor Freight for under $40. If you want to dedicate one to this process, drill a couple holes in the base, and tap those holes for mounting bolts. To adjsut the thickness of the strips, loosen the mount for the plane, slide in a couple of business cards to lift the plane a few thousandths, run the stock through to plane the first face, then remove the business cards (lowering the planer down to the original mounting height), and run the stock through to get it down to the desired finish size. These hand-held planers are usually 3 1/4" cut, or close to that. by the time you set them on a few strips to mount them, you have restricted the cutting area by another inch. For strips which are less than an inch wide this is not a problem.

If you don;t have a power hand plane, you can try mounting a belt sander. These have a lot of power, so any setup will need to be exremely robust, but I know that it can be done with some models of belt sanders. The danger of a kickback is very high, so use extra caution.

Most of these comments are addressed to the original poster, not to you, randy, but your note gave me a starting point, and I thank you for that.

PGJ