Flat, square, to thickness · review
The cheapest machine that does both jobs — flattening a face and taking a board to thickness — and the one most first workshops buy.
The end of it The machine that changes what you can build, at the price of a good hand plane and a half.
Every figure is a manufacturer specification, read off the listing itself, and the judgments are ours — drawn from how the specification behaves in this class of machine and from what long-term owners consistently report. Where a figure is missing, we say so rather than fill it in.
1,250 W, surface planing and thicknessing in one machine, part number 5902205901. Scheppach does not publish the table lengths on this listing.
A planer does two different things and people conflate them. Surfacing — running a board over the top of the cutter against a fence — makes one face flat and one edge square to it. Thicknessing — feeding it through underneath — makes the second face parallel to the first at a set dimension.
The order is not optional. A thicknesser references the face against its bed, so feeding in a cupped board gives you a thinner cupped board. Flatten a face first, then thickness to it. Half the frustration with these machines comes from skipping that step.
Snipe is the shallow dip a thicknesser cuts at the start and the end of a board — a few hundredths of a millimeter, over the last hundred millimeters or so. It happens because the board is held by two rollers in the middle of the cut and by only one at each end, so it lifts fractionally into the cutter.
No thicknesser in this price range eliminates it. The ones that manage it best have longer tables, adjustable rollers, or a head lock. The practical answer is the same on all of them: feed a sacrificial board nose-to-tail with the real one, or cut your stock 150 mm (5.91 in) over-length and trim the ends afterwards.
At this price the cutterhead carries straight knives. They cut cleanly with the grain and they tear out on anything figured, and resetting them after a nick is a fiddly job with a gauge. A helical head with indexed carbide inserts solves both — see the planer knife hub — and no machine at this price has one.
Read on the day this page was built: $835 at the American Amazon shop.
Read from Keepa on the day this page was last revised; stock and price both move without notice.
Prices quoted in this text were read on 2026-08-12. The live price is at the top of the page.
| Motor | 1,250 W |
|---|---|
| Functions | Surface planing and thicknessing |
| Part number | 5902205901 |
| Amazon reference | B01BTZLSNM (identical on 6 markets) |
| EAN | 4046664037477 |
Because pre-planed stock is expensive, limited in dimension, and rarely flat by the time you get it home — timber moves. A planer thicknesser is what lets you buy rough-sawn at a fraction of the price and produce exactly the section you need. It changes what a workshop can afford to build.
On a combination machine of this size, a few minutes each way — the surfacing tables have to be lifted clear and the guard moved. It sounds trivial and it is the reason people batch their work: all the surfacing first, then all the thicknessing.
A listing is not an offer: the reference exists on these stores, availability changes daily.
6.9/ 10
The machine that changes what you can build, at the price of a good hand plane and a half.
A first workshop buying rough-sawn timber instead of pre-planed stock
Specifications: the manufacturer sheet for woodworking machines and the matching Amazon product page. Prices and availability: Keepa. Every figure on this page names its source.
1,800 W · 317 mm (12.5 in) · portable
The professional portable thicknesser: 317 mm (12.5 in) wide, 1,800 W, and built to be carried to a job and used all day.
Best for: Daily use at full width, where the machine has to keep going rather than keep up
1,500 W · 204 mm (8.03 in) wide · 3 mm (0.12 in) cut · aluminum table
The only planer here that publishes how much it takes off in one pass — 3 mm (0.12 in) surfacing, 2 mm (0.08 in) thicknessing — and the most evenly priced across Europe.
Best for: Smaller stock — battens, rails, small beams — where 204 mm (8.03 in) is enough
230 V · planer thicknesser · nothing else published
A €1,098 planer whose listing publishes a part number and a barcode — and which costs €2,017 in Britain.
Best for: A buyer who has already seen this machine and needs a European price check
