Planer question

Betsy,
A lunchbox planer is 12-13” in general, how often are you running wide boards thru? I can see having wide glue ups. I normally use stock 6” or less in width due to the movement in the wood being greater with wide boards. With a 6”-8” board you should still be able to feed the stock on a angle with a “lunchbox”.
Besides it’s still more fun putting the good old hand planes to work??
Have fun,
PS, how are you feeling now, from the accident?

-- Ed Collinge- Edmonds, WA.

How do you like the Popular Woodworking magizine?

I agree, I have always hated articles in magizines where they are referring to machines that the average wood worker will not have due to it’s cost.

I’ve yet to even turn on my planer to even test it to see if it works. It’s a Ryobi. So I am learning the logo used with this and all other tools from here at LJ’s. I will have to test this out since I have alot of rough lumber to plane.

-- Jerry, Measure 10 times cut once. Set in the foothills of the Smokey's

Jerry,
I love Norm dearly but he makes me crazy with the machines he has. How many people have the room he has or that Timesaver drum sander! I often wonder if a lot of what he does is prepared by others?

-- Don, Pittsburgh

Ed – I have to agree the hand planes are more fun. Thanks for asking how I’m doing. I’m holding up. I’m having a lot of arm problems from a disc issue in my neck. I see the doctor on the 9th and he’ll tell me what I’ll have to do to fix the problem. The arm is what is keeping me from the shop – although I’m learning to do a lot of stuff left handed—- I just don’t understand how lefties made it through evolution. :-)

Sac – I like Popular Woodworking OK. I usually only subscribe for a year at a time. I’ve found that most, if not all, the magazines, simply rehash the same stuff over and over and so i take a year’s worth, then stop it for two years or so. So when I pick it up again, it’s fresher.

Jerry – I don’t know all that much about Norm – but I’ve heard that he does all the work himself. The only thing behind the scenes are the camera guys. The shop that is on the show is not his. His shop is apparently very modest in size. I understand that Norm is a super nice guy that is very down to earth and very personable.

-- Betsy - GO BUCKS!

Skewing any blade from square will help it cut better.

It’s cutting action is more like slicing rather then chopping.

It’s like those knife sharpening commericals on TV. If you notice they chop straight down with the “dull” blade, but take long slices with the “sharpened” blade.

Width permitting, I always run my boards through the planer at an angle, and not straight through. It also make the blades stay sharper by using more of it for the cut.

-- Gary, East TX -- The longest journey begins with a single step.

That’s good enough for me. Thanks Gary.

Where have you been hiding, have not seen you much lately?

-- Betsy - GO BUCKS!

There is a subtle flaw in the logic of Marc Adams suggestion. Angling the work (wood) has nothing at all to do with the angle of the cut. The cut is determined by the relative angle of the blade edge to the center of rotation of the turning cylinder. In the case of a traditional planer, the blade is ALWAYS parallel to the center of rotation. Every time a blade meets the wood it is chopping rather than slicing. By angling the wood, the planer is only chopping it at a different angle on the wood. It is NOT slicing it.

An improvement over the traditional arrangement described above was to arrange small square blade segments in a spiral around the cylinder. Each segment still remained parallel to the center of rotation, but the one big ‘chop’ was segmented into a series of small chops occurring sequentially.

With a newer technology (the Byrd ‘shelical’ head, for instance, found on the newer Powermatic planers), the blade edges of the segments are not parallel to the center of rotation. Rather, the cutting edge of each segment is angled to follow a spiral around the cylinder. This is the first TRUE application of a shearing cut in the examples presented.

-- Earle Wright, Lenoir City, Tennessee