The planing machine was one of the many woodworking devices invented by General Bentham. His first machine, British patent No. 1,838, of 1791, was a reciprocating machine, but in his British patent No. 1,951, of 1793, he described the rotary form along with a great variety of other woodworking machinery.
Bramah’s planer, British patent No. 2,652, of 1802, was about the first planing machine of the Nineteenth Century. It is known as a transverse planer, the cutters being on the lower surface of a horizontal disc, which is fixed to a vertical revolving shaft, and overhangs the board passing beneath it, the cutters revolving in a plane parallel with the upper surface of the board. The planing machine of Muir, of Glasgow, British patent No. 5,502, of 1827, was designed for making boards for flooring, and represented a considerable advance in the art.
With the greater wooded areas of America, the rapid growth of the young republic, and the resourceful spirit of its new civilization, the leading activities in woodworking machinery were in the second quarter of the Nineteenth Century transferred to the United States, and a phenomenal growth in this art ensued. Conspicuous among the early planing machine patents in the United States was that granted to William Woodworth, December 27, 1828. This covered broadly the combination of the cutting cylinders, and rolls for holding the boards against the cutting cylinders, and also means for tongueing and grooving at one operation. The revolving cutting cylinder had been used by Bentham thirty-five years before, and rollers for feeding lumber to circular saws were described in Hammond’s British patent No. 3,459, of 1811, but Woodworth did not employ his rolls for feeding, as a rack and pinion were provided for that, but his rolls had a co-active relation with a planer cylinder, or cutter head, in holding the board against the tendency of the cutter head to pull the board toward it. A patent was granted to Woodworth for these two features in combination, which patent was reissued July 8, 1845, twice extended, and for a period of twenty-eight years from its first grant, exerted an oppressive monopoly in this art, since it covered the combination of the two necessary elements of every practical planer.
Following the Woodworth patent came a host of minor improvements, among which were the Woodbury patents, extending through the period of the third quarter of the Nineteenth Century, and prominent among which is the patent to J. P. Woodbury, No. 138,462, April 20, 1873, covering broadly a rotary cutter head combined with a yielding pressure bar to hold the board against the lifting action of the cutter head.
In modern planing machinery the climax of utility is reached in the so-called universal woodworker. This is the versatile Jack-of-all-work in the planing mill. It planes flat, moulded, rabbeted, or beaded surfaces; it saws with both the rip and crosscut action; it cuts tongues and grooves; makes miters, chamfers, wedges, mortises and tenons, and is the general utility machine of the shop.
In [Fig. 246] is shown a well known form of planing machine. Its work is to plane the surfaces of boards, and to cut the edges into tongues and groves, such as are required for flooring. This machine planes boards up to 24 inches wide and 6 inches thick, and will tongue and grove 14 inches wide.
FIG. 246.—24-INCH SINGLE SURFACER AND MATCHER.