Smoooooooooth!!

[homebuilder]

Oh YEAH BABY!!! You're so Smooooooth!!! "What am I talking about you ask?" Well, my new Dewalt DW733 Planer that I picked up today!! What a great job it does on Oak and pine. I'll have to pick up some other woods and see how it does on those too. I purchased it at WoodCraft because they matched the $299.00 price that Amazon.com is advertising.(And we ALL know what my track record for UPS shipments is);)

So at any rate, I love this new planer!! Sorry but I just had to gloat for a minute.

Ciao!!

Clint

[Keystone]

Clint

Welcome to the wonderful world of ruff cut lumber! Just think of how fast you will recover the cost of that thickness planner!

God choice on the DW by the way......

[randall]

We bought one of these for travelling on organ installs, bet they haven't used it more than once. We can't get some freaking hammers, dollies, material handling equipment or stuff we NEED like new push blocks for the planner which we would use daily, but they can go and buy stuff like this we almost never use and just sits in the box in the storage building, go figure!

I took the DeWalt out of the box and set it up when it arrived last summer, man was that puppy a heavy chunk of machine!
I liked the machine, may get one for home next year.

Hey Homebuilder, Aazon is offering FREE shipping on this, ya didn't want to get it shipped <G>?


I only ran a test board thru it once, lots of noise but cut Smoooooooth.
I think the blades are real fast to change out, and that's what has me going huh??? with our older Powermatic planner, it will take about an 18" wide board and has an on board deal to attach a sharpener to.

The thing is a maintenance headache, when the blades get small chips or grooves in them someone spends hours grinding the primary and the secondary and the whatever angles on the blades, then readjusting the pressure bar and the feed and all that stuff.
Takes hours.

Went thru that riggamarole when a nail chipped a small groove in the blades, I asked why not just put in new ones, they cant cost THAT much- would certainly seem cheaper to insert new blades and be done with it than spend 6 hours or more @ $50/hour shop time to fool with resharpening the suckers.

I was told even with new blades they would have to do all the grinding on the primary, secondary, set the blade height, pressure bar and all the rest, just seems to be rediculous to me, as rediculous as having to change the oil, filter, transmission fluid, filter and grease everytime you drove your car!

Seems to me money would be well spent dumping that thing and getting a new one that doesn't have all that stuff that has to be done to it everytime the blades need sharpening!

Thing is, the old guy likes to run the feed rate on maximum speed, even oak planks, and pretty quickly after sharpening, like a day or two you go to use the machine and the blades leave little grooves/scores on the wood and burn spots sometimes, so we put up with that for a couple of weeks till the dude sharpens them again. Then within days they start leaving grooves, and these are carbide...
Funny, when *I* use the planer I put the feed rate on the slowest speed and I don't get burning and gouges.
The machine says not to exceed somethiing like 3/8" or somesuch cut per pass, and no more than 1/8" difference in thickness between multiple strips. I take off a maximum of
4mm per pass and only on poplar not oak and on the slowest feed rate.
The dude who sharpens it says "You take off THAT MUCH at once???!!!"
I go, well yeah, the label right on the machine says maximum 3/8" and 4 mm isn't even close, and only on poplar, and usually boards no wider than about 4 or 5", the motor dosn't even slow down, it's well within the design limits.

The old guy's oak cutting will have chunks of pencil erasor sized oak flying out, you can hear the motor bogging down during the cuts, and his boards are often 10 to 12 " wide!

The old guy is the same one who cranks down the "pony" pipe clamps so tight the 1" black iron pipe bends at the head and a few have threads that gave out. All the clamps have this curious little bend where they screw into the clamp head.

Me thinks any joint that needs that kind of pressure to get the glue squeezed aint gonna hold for many years, but he's the old guy and he knows all, or so he claims.

I think its model 221 looks like this

http://www.exfactory.com/literature/POWERMAT/221A.jpg

[Sonny Edmonds]

Clint,
Well, i know I sure like mine alot. Ya know that cedar they sell to line a closet with?
Well I told my little Betty I could make her some for the back wall of the old house for her closet.
She was a bit sceptical at first. She olny wanted me to plane up one board of commom cedar fence boards for a look-see.
She loved it! And it done a fine job on that back wall of the closet.
So don't overlook the rough stuff at the store, now you too can make shinola from chit.
Get you some extry knives for it, afore you run into an "AW shoot" and FUBAR your current blades.
Plane on Brother!

:D

[link:www.sonnyedmonds.com | Sonny Edmonds]
"Precision Firewood Specialist"
God Bless America !
One Nation Under God!
"I was raised around lead based paint.
It ain't an excuse, just a fact."

[milanuk]

Randall,

Sounds like your 'old guy' might be related to someone I know!

The odds-n-ends Craftsman stuff I have in my shop (I'm 'tool-sitting' for someone) includes a 13" planer that the handle is broken on. When the guys dropped it off, they said that they thought one or more of the elevator gears was either jammed or broken, and had been that way since before they were in possession of it. According to the story (and knowing the fellow involved, I don't really doubt it) some ninny failed to read the manual and thought that the cut height indicator was where you set it to what ever size you want, and just start stuffing boards thru...

Take a wild guess at what happened when he set it on '3/4"' and tried stuffing a 2x4 thru it... Me, I wouldn't a thought it'd even come close to fitting in opening, much less make it to the blades, but somehow, it did. Yikes! Hopefully he didn't 'kill' the thing, and I can get it up and running for the grandparents w/ a little elbow grease. In any event, it's gonna be educational ;)

Monte

[randall]

According to the story (and
>knowing the fellow involved, I don't really doubt it) some
>ninny failed to read the manual and thought that the cut
>height indicator was where you set it to what ever size you
>want, and just start stuffing boards thru...
>
>Take a wild guess at what happened when he set it on '3/4"'
>and tried stuffing a 2x4 thru it...

LOL some folks shouldn't be near powertools :) Good thing he didn't try setting it at 1/16" to get veneer without checking the height stop screw was set to prevent the steel bed from winding up in the blades!

Speaking of planning down lumber, how about this planning job;

The largest pipe in the now defunct Atlantic City convention hall organ and also the largest organ pipe in the world is the low "C" of the 64 foot Diaphone Profunda. The pipe is 64 feet nine inches long, ten Inches square at the base and 36 Inches square at the top. It is made of Oregon fir, 3 inches thick, and by counting the "rings" a lumber expert determined that the tree from which it came was at least 785 years old. The 12 pipes that make up the lower octave of this stop contain over 10,000 board feet of lumber.

A total of 225,000 board feet of lumber was used in the organ's construction.

[TDHofstetter]

Aha - calls back memory of when I finally got my mostly-Foley-Belsaw planer up & running after making new feedworks for it. BOY, was that fun! You could stuff rough stuff in one end and out the other end came shiny stuff and fluff enough to stuff a chair with! :)

-- Tim --

May your mind's eye
never
blink.
...unless you're contemplating feeding a troll...

[Billy B]

Clint,

One word of caution that just came to mind is that I would strongly suggest that when you run this machine you wear hearing protection. I have a dedicated set hanging on a hook right next to the on switch.

Also, I noticed, and this is probably a general observation that if you feed smaller or thinner boards through with a diagonal feed you will get better results and is probably better than a straight feed. Your blades will wear a little more evenly and last a little longer.

I absolutely love this little guy, and it is close to having paid for itself.

Cheers,
Billy B.



Live a life of thankfulness; if for no other reason, that you have life.

[Billy B]

Sonny,

that sounds like the story of my life.

"AW shoot" and FUBAR :7

Billy B.


Live a life of thankfulness; if for no other reason, that you have life.

[homebuilder]

I ran some rough pine though it last night and, my significant other has taken a shine to my test piece of wood. She told me last night that, "As long as she can stroke that SMOOTH piece of wood, she doesn't need me around any longer".....UH Ooooooh!!!!<LOL>( Me thinks I'm in deep CHIT now)<LOL> :D

I did take the precaution today of installing a pad lock on the power switch of the planer so, if ANYONE wants something planed, they have to come to ME!!<G>(See this Italian does have a few tricks left)

I also have a whole loft full of dried and cured rough cut 1x6 redwood so, that might be my next project this weekend?! Today I made a stand with wheels for the unit as, my back TOLD ME TO DO THIS LAST NIGHT!!!

Ciao!!

Clint