This is more common than it sounds
A lot of owners describe the same arc. The machine came out of the box cutting cleanly, the first few months were fine, and somewhere along the way snipe appeared and kept getting worse. It is a common enough story that people start wondering whether they got a dud.
Almost always, nothing has failed. Several things drift slowly with use, and every one of them pushes toward more snipe rather than less. The good news is that most of them are reversible in an afternoon with a rag and some wax.
Here is the list, roughly in order of how likely it is to be your answer.
1. The feed rollers are glazed
The most likely culprit, and the easiest to fix.
Rubber rollers pick up pitch, resin and fine dust, which builds into a hard glaze on the surface. A glazed roller grips less and compresses differently than a clean one. Since snipe is driven by how the load changes when a roller picks up or releases the board, a change in how the rubber behaves changes the snipe directly.
Unplug the machine, get at the rollers, and clean them with mineral spirits on a rag until the rag stops coming away brown. Let them dry completely. People are regularly surprised by how much this alone changes.
2. The rubber has hardened
Separate from glazing, rubber stiffens as it ages. Heat, oxidation and time all contribute, and a planer stored in an unconditioned garage ages faster. Stiffer rollers conform less and hand the board off more abruptly.
You cannot reverse this with cleaning. If your rollers are visibly shiny, hard to the fingernail, or cracked, they are candidates for replacement. This is also worth considering on a secondhand machine of unknown age.
3. The bed needs waxing
A dry or slightly rusty bed increases the force needed to push a board through. More force means more load on the carriage, and more load means more flex when that load changes.
Clean the bed, then apply paste wax and buff it out. Do this more often than you think. It takes five minutes and it also makes the machine feel better to use.
4. The knives have dulled
This one catches people out because they are looking for cut quality problems rather than thickness problems.
Dull knives need more force to remove the same material. More cutting force means more deflection in the carriage, so the same underlying flex produces a deeper snipe than it did when the blades were sharp. Your surface finish may still look acceptable while this is happening.
Rotate or replace the knives. With a helical head, check for inserts that are chipped or worn at the corner in use.
5. Play has developed in the columns
The cutterhead carriage rides on threaded posts. Over time, dust works into them, lubrication dries out, and play increases. More play means the carriage has more room to shift when the load changes at the handoff.
Raise the head, clean the posts thoroughly, and lubricate them according to your manual. On a DW735 the carriage lock engages automatically, so if you have been running with debris packed around the columns, cleaning them is worth doing before you look at anything else mechanical.
6. Something about the work changed
Worth a moment of honesty here, because it is often the real answer.
Snipe scales with the forces involved. If you have moved to wider stock, denser species, heavier passes, or longer and heavier boards than you used to run, the machine is seeing more load and the snipe will be deeper. Nothing has degraded. The demand went up.
The same applies to the seasons. A shop that drops below about 50F changes how the rollers behave, which we cover in why cold shops make snipe worse.
7. You changed the cutterhead
If snipe appeared after a helical head install, that is a known pattern rather than a coincidence. Some aftermarket heads are made to a smaller diameter than the original, which shifts the relationship between the rollers and the cutting circle so the rollers press relatively deeper. Our post on helical heads covers it.
The pattern underneath all of this
Look at what items one through five have in common. Every one of them changes how much load the rollers put on the board, or how much the carriage moves when that load changes.
On a machine with roller height adjustment, drift like this is routine. You check the setting, reset it, carry on. It is a maintenance item, the same as waxing the bed.
The DeWalt DW735 ships with no roller height adjustment at all. There is nothing to reset. As the rubber hardens and the geometry drifts, the machine moves further from where it started and stays there, which is exactly why so many owners describe snipe appearing over time rather than on day one.
That is the honest version of the story. It is not that your planer broke. It is that it drifted and there is no provision for bringing it back.
Where to go from here
Work through the cleaning and maintenance list first. It is free, it fixes a good proportion of these cases, and the machine will run better regardless of what happens next. Then measure what is left with calipers so you know whether you still have a problem worth solving.
If you do, our post on feed roller adjustment explains what would have to change, and our Planer Snipe Fix Kit adds the adjustment this machine was never given, with a 30 day money back guarantee.