The argument, stated fairly
If you have spent time reading about snipe on the DeWalt DW735, you have met this one. It usually arrives from someone who knows machinery, and it goes roughly like this.
Industrial planers have a pressure bar. The DW735 does not. Without a pressure bar there is nothing holding the board flat against the bed at the moment it leaves the knives, so the board is free to rise into the cutterhead as the rollers hand it off. Snipe on this class of machine is therefore designed in, and no accessory can change that.
This deserves a real answer rather than a brush-off, because the premise is correct and the person making it usually knows more about planers than the average commenter. Here is where it holds and where it stops.
What a pressure bar does
On a larger planer, the cut happens inside a sequence of components. The infeed roller pulls the stock in. A chipbreaker presses down just ahead of the knives. The cutterhead cuts. Immediately after it, a pressure bar presses the board firmly down against the bed. Then the outfeed roller takes over.
The pressure bar earns its place at that specific position. It holds the board against the reference surface right at the point where it is leaving the cut, and it does that independently of what the feed rollers are doing. Whatever is happening to roller pressure upstream and downstream, the board stays put against the bed as it passes the knives.
That independence is the whole point. It separates what the rollers are doing from where the board sits relative to the cutting circle.
The DW735 has no equivalent member. It is a benchtop machine with two rollers and a cutterhead between them, and that is the extent of the hold-down. So yes, the premise stands.
Where the argument goes wrong
The conclusion treats a pressure bar as the only way to break the link between roller behavior and the cutting plane. It is one way. It is not the only one.
Think about what is actually producing the error on this machine. Both rollers press down hard enough to compress the board noticeably into the rubber. For most of the pass, both are loaded and everything sits still. When the board enters, only the infeed roller is loaded. When it leaves, only the outfeed roller is. The total load on the carriage changes at those two moments, the assembly flexes a few thousandths in response, and the cutting plane moves.
A pressure bar handles that by refusing to let the board follow the change. It corrects the error after the fact, at the point where it matters.
There is a second approach, which is to make the change smaller in the first place.
The size of the load swing depends on how deeply the rollers compress into the board. The stock rollers on a DW735 press considerably deeper than they need to for reliable feeding. All of that extra engagement is stored energy that gets added or removed at the handoff. Limit how far the rollers travel down, and you shrink the difference between the two-roller and one-roller states. Less difference means less flex change, which means the cutting plane moves less.
You end up at a similar place by a different route. Rather than resisting a load swing, you reduce the swing that needs resisting.
The honest limits
Two things need saying plainly, because overclaiming here is how you lose a reader who actually understands machines.
This does not turn a benchtop planer into an industrial one. A 2,000 pound planer resists flex because it is 2,000 pounds, with a pressure bar on top of that. A DW735 with its roller travel bounded is still a benchtop planer with a lighter carriage and four lead screws. The gap narrows considerably. It does not close.
Zero is the wrong target. What owners who dial this in carefully report is snipe in the range of one to two thousandths of an inch, which on most work is below the depth of a normal sanding pass. One customer working to puzzle-making tolerances measured exactly that. Another measured about a tenth of a millimeter along the full length of his boards with no technique at all. Those are real numbers from real shops, and they are also not zero.
If your standard is a perfectly unmeasurable board, no benchtop planer will meet it and this post is not going to convince you otherwise.
The other version of the objection
There is a second form of this argument worth addressing: that limiting roller travel just mimics lifting the board by hand, and therefore is not a real fix.
These are not the same mechanism. Lifting changes the angle at which the board presents itself to the cut, using your judgment, on each individual pass. Bounding roller compression changes how much load moves at the handoff, mechanically, in a position you set once with a feeler gauge.
But grant the comparison for the sake of argument. Even then, one of them depends on your feel at the moment the board exits, on every board, including the heavy ones where you also need both hands. The other holds a setting you can return to. For anyone doing repeatable work, that difference is the entire value.
Why this matters more than it sounds
The pressure bar argument is persuasive, and it is told to people who are actively looking for a solution. When they accept it, they stop looking. That is the real cost of a conclusion that overshoots its premise.
It is also worth knowing that one owner sent his DW735X back to DeWalt, where technicians made their own test cuts and told him the snipe was within acceptable limits for the machine. That is one owner's account of what he was told rather than a published position, but it supports the part of the argument that is correct: snipe on this machine is designed in tolerance and not a defect in your particular unit or your technique.
Designed in tolerance is something you can engineer around. That is a more useful conclusion than impossibility.
If you want to look at it yourself
Our full explanation of why the DW735 snipes puts this argument in the context of the whole mechanism, including why longer tables help some owners and not others.
Our post on feed roller adjustment covers what the DW735 does and does not let you set, and why the classic snipe tricks are workarounds walks through the mechanism in full.
Our Planer Snipe Fix Kit adds precision height adjustment to both feed rollers. It carries a 30 day money back guarantee, which exists precisely because arguments like this one are hard to settle on paper and easy to settle on a board.