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John Rumm
 
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Default DW733 Portable Thicknesser - mini review

Andy Hall wrote:

There was a higher cost category including Makita and (curiously)
Ridgid. The main benefits of these were not in terms of quality of
result - the DW did better both in terms of snipe and parallelism -
but convenience. The Makita has some quick release and fit blade
arrangements and a good depth gauge. However it is nearly $500 vs
the $350 (at the time) of the DW.

I've sent you a copy of the review.


Thanks for that. I did look into the Makita and managed to track down
some reviews of it. The main benefit of that one seemed to be quicker
service times and better portability. Neither of which were quite as
high up my requirements list as finish quality and lack of snipe "out of
the box". IIRC there are a few places selling it for similar money to
the DW as well.

I found an article with a project to make a portable set of
infeed/outfeed tables that you might find useful. One of my US
friends made one of these and it helps a lot with longer or wider
pieces - especially hardwoods. I'll send you that as well.


Thanks again. In fact I think I saw a similar idea shown in either FWW
or woodsmith this month (can't remember which). The downside with that
for me is lack of shop space. Long stock preparation is more a summer
job since I need to take over a lump of back garden, or alternatively
setup the thicknesser toward the door of my workshop so that I can plane
with the outfeed into the garden onto a roller stand (while keeping me
and the dust collector inside in the warm!). Having said that, the lack
of snipe on this one does actually mean it is easy enough to plane stock
after it has been cut to length rather than have to allow for chopping
the ends off - so the 1.5m (ish) length I can handle inside the workshop
is adequate in most cases.

Power seems good, but then again I have not tried planing any 12" wide
oak board yet!


The point is to have freahly sharp knives and not to attempt to plane
too much at a time.


Not having a ready supply of oak in these parts also cuts down the need
to do it that often!

The FWW review indicated that the DW knives could be sharpened up to 5
times if you wanted.


I have not taken them out to look closely - but there does seem to be a
reasonable amount of meat on them...

Note that unlike the model reviewed then machine in the UK does *not*
come with a spare set of knives.

If you are going to work with hardwoods, proper dust extraction is
really important as dust tends to be finer and more irritant than with
softwoods. Generally I notice in my dust collector that there is a
greater proportion of finer dust to chips from hardwoods than from
softwoods.


Indeed I would not dream of doing it without...

(I was helping a mate prepare some oak edging for his kitchen worktops a
couple of weeks back using his Axminster thicknesser without any
collection! I was trying to convince him that it would actually save him
time and money to get a chip collector since if nothing else you save
hours sweeping up and wading through a sea of planer shavings. It
obviously sank in, since he looked at me using the DW with collection
the other day and decided that perhaps it was a good idea after all)


--
Cheers,

John.

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