How to Eliminate Thickness Planer Snipe (Without Modifying Your Planer)

Hi folks, I'm Mark from Nomad Boatbuilding. Now today I want to talk to you about a very common occurrence in woodworking and that is getting snipe when you're working with a thickness planer. If you're new to woodworking and you're chugging something through a thickness planer, you might notice that at the ends of your plank your material is a little bit thinner than in the middle. That's a phenomenon we call snipe. Snipe is a function of your material engaging with only one of the pressure feed rollers as it goes through the planer. So when you start the cut, it's only encountering the one pressure feed roller and then it encounters the cutter head and then when you finish the cut, it leaves one of the rollers and is engaged with only the cutter head and the other roller. And so as a result, your plank kind of is able to shift up or down a little tiny bit and that's what that snipe is. Now some people will try and build elaborate extension tables that will help to minimize snipe. It might even get rid of it entirely. But it requires you having a much larger footprinted machine. That might be fine for your shop but a lot of shops don't have that space to have a big long bed on either end of your thickness planer. Most thickness planers come with some sort of extensions that help to counteract that. So they'll have little flip down tables or in the case of this older planer, it's got a separate part that drops on there. I always find it's a hassle pulling that stuff out so I don't use them. And even if you do have them on there, they're usually not adjusted very well or positioned properly to eliminate snipe. So what do you do about that? Well, first of all, you try to make sure the material you have is long enough such that the snipe becomes waste material in your finished product. Most snipe is about three inches long depending on the planer. It's the distance from the center of your cutter head to the center of your feed roller. That's going to be how long your snipe is. And so that means all of your material needs to be usually at least six inches longer than your finished part. That's usually fine in most cases because the ends of a board are kind of dried or cracked and you usually want to chop those away anyway. But every now and then you have to work with a piece of material that you don't have that extra length. Perhaps you've developed a process in which it makes more sense to pre-cut something to length before you thickness it. Maybe your shop's just not big enough to accommodate long planks and you want to make them shorter and you don't have that extra material. So what do you do about snipe? Well, there's a few things that you can do. Besides building an elaborate in-feed and out-feed table, there's a few tricks that I owls use. First of all, if I'm working with a long plank, I owls lift up on the end of the plank as it's going into the feed roller and lift up as it's coming out the other end. Just a little upward pressure can do a lot to minimize snipe partially or entirely. Especially if the board is long and flexible, I will really lift up on it quite a bit. If it's a heavier plank, I'll just lift up on it a tiny bit because you have some leverage there that might actually put a lot of pressure on the machine and we don't want that. The second thing I often do is I'll try to feed the plank through starting with one corner. I don't know why this works but I get very little snipe. That snipe is minimized to one corner of the board but maybe that's just the bit of extra you need. So this planer has quite a high feed rate so it's a little bit tricky to do but by feeding it diagonally, you're only introducing one corner to the rollers at a time and it seems to reduce snipe quite a bit. So at the tail end, I do have some snipe here. This last little corner, there's actually no snipe whatsoever at the other end here. The last thing you can do is use sacrificial battens and that means if I have a piece of material that's say two feet long that I want to run through my planer, I'll take a piece of material that's three feet long, start it into the planer and then feed my proper material in right beside it and then catch them both coming out the other end. And that extra piece of material, it takes care of the snipe. The pressure feed rollers are engaged in it and the part that you want to be snipe free will often pass through without any snipe happening onto it. Now you can improve that technique by actually fastening that sacrificial material to your plank material. So I have this piece of material, it's an offcut that's just long enough for the part that I need to make. I've got a couple extra inches but not enough to accommodate snipe and so by using these sacrificial battens on either side, and so I've just attached those with masking tape and cyanoacrylate glue, they've got the snipe onto them and the part that I want to keep does not. Pop those right off, peel my tape and then I've got my finished plank snipe free. The other thing I occasionally do is make a quick and dirty sled. I'll take a piece of plywood, I'll put a little stop at one end that is the distance of the typical snipe from your planer and then I'll add some sacrificial runners onto that plywood and then run that whole thing through. This is especially helpful when you're working with really thin materials that will tend to sort of behave badly in a planer. This method is especially effective if you're trying to cut short materials through a planer because there's a limit to how short a piece of material you want to shove through a thickness planer. So it's usually not advisable to put something through that's smaller than say a foot long. Every now and then you might have to do something like that and so the trick is to make something that is longer than that material, that has rails on it that are the same thickness as your finished material, maybe a hair thicker so that they both get planed at the same time and it wouldn't hurt to actually fasten down your short in some sort of way. Perhaps it's just masking tape and CA glue or a few dabs of hot glue around the corners or something like that. There's a lot of different pieces of ingenuity you can explore. So I hope that was useful to you. In the world of woodworking with machines, snipe is just one of those things that occurs in your processing that you have to accommodate one way or another. So you either just live with it and you have some extra waste material or you use some ingenuity to get rid of it entirely. OK folks, this is Mark from Nomad Boatbuilding, we'll see you next time.