Inside View of a Wood Planer

I've taught a lot of people how planers work. And I always ended up standing just like this and saying infeed roller outfeed roller, cutterhead. And the thing is, it's all down inside there where none of us can really see what's going on. One of the things we've been doing at our video shoots more and more is using a GoPro camera. And what's so cool with these is the versatility they bring to the shoot.

It's so small and compact. We can put it anywhere. It's sending a signal back to the table where the director sits so he can see exactly what the camera's seeing. So what's cool here is we're poking the camera into a position where it's looking up inside the guts of the planer. Now understand, we're not sending anything weird through the planer, we're still just sending wood through.

But what it's gonna let me do is send this piece of cedar through, and you're gonna be able to see exactly how the planer works as it's removing material from this cedar four by four. Now let's revisit then what the planer does. So as you're seeing the action on the GoPro camera, you can understand it. There's always an infeed roller on the infeed side. Then there's an outfeed roller.

Between the two there's a cutterhead. So when I start the piece of cedar in there, the infeed roller, which in the case of this one is rubber-coated, is gonna grab the material, propel it under the cutterhead. Then you're gonna see material be removed. The outfeed roller, also rubber-coated, then grabs it on the outfeed side, pulls it the rest of the way. If we were in a bigger planer or a stationary planer, only difference is infeed roller would probably be a serrated steel roller.

Then we've got the cutterhead, and then a rubber or polyurethane-coated outfeed roller. So let me change my depth of cut and then we'll send the cedar through there and watch the chips fly. How was that for cool? It's one way that we're trying to make our videos better and better by bringing more technology into the shop, getting that tiny little camera in spots where we otherwise couldn't get a camera.