In article TxTmg.1498$il.447@trnddc03, says...

wrote in message
oups.com...
I have had the Delta for about 2 years. I am very happy with the finish
that it produces. It is easy to use and has plenty of balls for
aggressive thicknessing. It isn't perfect though. One problem that I
have (and have read that this is common), the wood feed system is VERY
finicky. If everything isn't 100% perfect, the wood will stop feeding
and you have to manually push it until it starts feeding again. You
have to keep all the metal parts on the bottom very clean and waxed
plus clean the feed rollers all the time and even then, it might just
quit feeding anyway. Adjusting the feed rollers is very difficult and
the paragraph and illustration in the manual about making the
adjustment just plain suck. I got the optional dust collector hood and
hook it up to a strong shop vac. It clogs regularly (every 5 -10
minutes of steady planing) and must be dismantled to clean (about 5
minutes work). This gets to be a drag so I usually abandon the
collector, let the chips fly and then clean it up later.

A shop vac does not have enough CFM to get all of the chips - I had the same
problem - it went away when hooked up to a good dust collector system. The
shop vac has high velocity but low cfm versus the low velocity high CFM of
the cust collector.

BB

If I knew the DeWalt would produce the same finish and not have these
two pain in the ass problems, I would probaly pay the extra money for
the DeWalt. Besides, the DeWalt is cooler looking anyway.

Chuck

My 735 does, very occasionally, stop feeding a board but a slight
push/tug gets it moving again. Note, that this is a rare occurrence and
hasn't been anywhere near a problem. In a year and a half I haven't had
to adjust feed rollers, so don't know how big a chore that would be.

I bought the unit with the dust collection hood -- actually, jut a piece
of fabric that you could tie over a trash can. I only used it for a
very short period of time and trashed it -- it's really a jinky, at
best, solution. I got a real dust collector shortly thereafter (needed
for TS and router table, anyway). I don't have any problems with
chips/dust clogging.

BTW, I bought from Amazon.com when they had some kind of sales
promotional going ($35 off). I got free shipping and no sales tax
(8.5%). Net cost $464, delivered to my door with no problems.

tex