Mending Fences

John Crammond adds a robust upgrade to a woodworking planer

I’m sure that all of us whose efforts are mainly concerned with metal, will at some time or another have been dragged kicking and screaming into doing a bit of woodwork. It may be for making a box or cabinet to house some tooling, or a repair job inside the home, I’m afraid that it’s a skill that does not come easily to me. So it was when I got fed up trying to get square edges that I decided to get one of those ubiquitous planer thicknessers to solve my problems.

There are dozens of them, all very similar and I suspect all coming from far off places. I chose a mid range model having viewed a couple of U tube videos and was aware of the faults that I would encounter, most of which involved the fence. The machine duly arrived and I was delighted with its appearance, one problem that others have had with the infeed and outfeed tables being out of line did not exist on mine as they were perfect. However, as I expected the fence was flimsy and would bend at the slightest pressure. One other problem with the fence was that it could not be extended across the tables, a consequence of that being that the cutter blades would always wear more quickly on the fence side and would eventually produce uneven results.

I decided to solve both these problems by producing a fence of substantial proportions with an arrangement that would enable it to be positioned anywhere up to half way across the table’s width, photo 1. My idea consists of a baseplate semi-permanently attached to the machine by existing screws and fixings, on top of which would be a sub base with hinged fence able to be moved and clamped where desired. I resolved not to drill any holes or make any alteration to the planer in any way as this would undoubtedly invalidate its guarantee.