I've been needing a planer for quite awhile and after much shopping and searching around, I finally purchased this one on Craigslist. It's a Craftsman 12 inch planer which I can find absolutely no information on anywhere on the internet. Strange. However I did find a manual and Sears still sells parts, so I'm happy with that. It's slightly used but in overall very good condition, and being my first planer, I'm very please with it. Well, I'll skip to some photos now!
The planer is quite the little beast for a benchtop style. It's got a 2 1/2 hp motor and 12" by 5 1/2" capacity and a four post height adjustment system which makes for a much more stable cutterhead. The height adjustment gauge is quite accurate and easy to read. Overall a very good planer.
We've had these old pallet boards lying around for years. (Waiting around to be passed through a planer I guess) So after taking some intial test cuts with some poplar, I passed one of these through to see how the planer would do and what exactly was underneath the weathered surface of the board.
Can you guess which one is the before and which is the after? Haha! Yeah, after the first pass through the planer what I saw a beautiful oak board! Hey what a great way to start of my planing experience!
When I first went to use the planer the boards would not feed through and the feed rollers kept spinning out on the boards. My heart sank. What was wrong? Well I had noticed earlier that the previous owner had never taken off the original plastic bed protector and it had been peeling up everywhere and was causing wood to grab. Well I took that all off and polished the bed and Voila! it worked like a dream. So I'm glad that wasn't anything worse.
Here's my temporary dust collection system. After planing the first board, I realized my that my need for dust collection/control was increasing with every board foot. So...
...this has to be emptied out promptly so I won't be buried alive by sawdust.
Now I can finally get around to cleaning up all those rough cut boards cluttering up my shop!
Thanks for reading!
