Wood Magazine 196 by Bill Krier

Author:Bill Krier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Wood, Home and hobby woodworker
Publisher: Meredith Corporation
Published: 2010-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

Magnetic knife holders, like this on the DeWalt OW734, keep your fingers clear of the raior-sharp edges when changing knive*,

concede that snipe is unavoidable and you should just cut off the sniped ends.

Features that separate these planers

• Changing knives. Depending on how much you plane and what materials you use, your frequency of changing

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With the Stee I City, you rotate or replace on ly the cutters that need it. But this cutterhead doesn't lock; you have to hold It steady.

Depth stops work like rotating turret stops on a plunge router. To fine-tune the accuracy sim ply a djus t the stop bolt up or down.

knives will vary, But the process should be easy and intuitive. Here's where an automatic cutterhead lock helps, preventing the head from rotating while you remove the bolts and knives. On K Delta's TF30S and Steel City's 40200H lack this feature.

All the straight-knife cutterhead models, except Ryobi, feature self-indexing, double-edged knives, as shown on previous page. Ryobi's knives, though double-edged, are not self-indexing. Changing knives on this planer proved to be the most difficult and time-consuming in the test.

The Steel City unit comes standard with a segmented cutterhead, shown above, composed of 26 W-thick rings on a shaft. F.ach segment holds a high-speed-steel insert cutter, each with four culling edges. It's not a true spiral cutterhead because the cutters do not sit at a slight angle and make a true shearing cut. The chief advantage to this head Is thai, should you nick one or more cutlers, vou .simply rotate the affected inserts a quarter-turn for a fresh cutting edge. No need to replace a full set of knives. To check knife durability, we accelerated dulling by planing parlklehoard—an abrasive material you should not purposely plane—until the original cutting i-dgr showed obvious wear, WV found I.hat Sled City's iusltIs i i i.nned sharp al leasl 33 percent longer per edge than all hut one competitor, beating runner-up Makita by 25 percent,

Craftsman's B"-wide 21748 comes with a three-knife cutterhead, but offers a segmented head similar to Steel City's as an option ($250). We tested both heads and found their cut

quality, snipe, and edge wear so similar, we can't make an argument for the upgrade.

• Setting cutting depth, Eight machines feature a gauge, similar to the one shown bottom left, that indicates the amount of material being removed with each pass, These gauges help you avoid taking too large a bite, which might result in tear-out or deeper snipe. Most work well and read easily. However, Makita does not have a scale on its gauge, making it difficult to determine the depth of cut accurately.

We like the preset depth stops included on seven of the planers; Craftsman 21758, Delta, Makita, and Ryobi don't have them. I fiesf adjustable Slops stlGWH flfartf; prevent planing a board thinner than a targeted thickness, a handy feature when planing multiple project parts to Identical thickness.

• Dust collection. These planers generate loads of chips lhat make a mess if you don't hook up a dust collector or vacuum.

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