Adjusting this homemade thickness planer for thicknessing wood may not be as simple as setting a normal carpenter’s thicknesser that you can buy at a hardware store or a DIY center. But it is still easy to adjust it to get the exact dimensions desired in our wood strips and boards.
It is still an electric planer, so I use the built in adjustment system that it has, but in combination with the position of the side fence.
The electric planer has two metal bases, one fixed after the cutting blades (the outfeed table) and a movable one at the front (the infeed table). So, in this DIY thickness planer, the final thickness of the workpiece that we pass through the thicknesser will be equal to the distance between the outfeed table and the side fence. It is then a matter of adjusting the gap between the outfeed table of the electric planer and the side fence so that the gap is exactly the same as the final thickness we want for our wood. To adjust the spacing we can use a metal ruler and measure, although if we already have a strip with the desired width, the easiest way is to use that strip to adjust that spacing.
Now the whole problem for thicknessing wood is that our wood passes between the side fence and the infeed table in the front of the electric planer. Once we have set the desired thicknessing width between the outfeed table of the electric planer and the side fence, if the piece of wood fits between the infeed table and the side fence, then with a single pass through the planer we achieve the desired final thickness.
But if we find that the wood to be thicknessed does not enter in the front of the DIY thickness planer, we must separate the side fence a little until it does enter and make a first thicknessing. Repeat the same operation until the wood enters through the front of the thickness planer when the separation between the outfeed table and the side fence is equal to the desired final thickness.
As seen in the video, in this homemade thickness planer I only use the adjustment of the mobile base of the electric planer to adjust the position of the strip at the entrance, and make sure that it enters the blades with the opposite side (the side that I do not want to plane) well attached to the side fence.