I waxed my feed tables which made a world of difference. Wood that
would not get pulled in before the wax worked as expected. No other
ideas as I have a Makita combo which is a toy compared to yours. I did
see a post recently for rebuilding my Makita's rollers. You send off
your dried out worn polyurathane rollers, they strip them and pour new
poly on them. They then turn the rollers to the proper shape.

Is there any chance you machine may have dirty feed rollers? We used
to slather up some kerosene to clean up dirty tables and rollers at
one wood shop I worked at. Oops, maybe that was for a table saw with
an electric feed that we ripped yellow pine on. Lots of pitch gummed
things up.

Your service manual does mention too low can cause problems to the
rubber rollers.

On 10 Feb 2007 13:48:55 -0800, "dpb" wrote:

On Feb 10, 10:41 am, "J.M." wrote:
I have a powermatic PM15 5HP (Planer / Molder) and I'm trying to set the
height of the infeed and outfeed rollers in relation to the cutting blades.
I've been having so much trouble that I finalled bought a bed feed roll
gauge / deflection gauge to measure the distance and set the rollers.
According to the manual the in-feed roller needs to be 1/16 lower then the
blade and the out-feed roller 1/32. When I checked the current setup they
were way to low and so I assume the lumber was butting up against the roller
instead of feeding under it. Anyway after reseting the rollers to the
"proper" heights the unit will not plane 1/8 of a pine board while pulling
the lumber through, I cranked the rollers down a little more and it's still
not grabbing. Am I doing something wrong or is the manuals guidlines way
off?

Owning and having used only older "heavy metal" planers, can only
describe basics of their operation and adjustment. Hopefully that
will help for your situation as well.

Sounds like reasonable settings for infeed and outfeed rollers, so
problem would seem to be elsewhere. There are the basic adjustments
of in/outfeed rollers, bed rollers (if extant) and chipbreaker.

If have bed rollers, make sure they're just proud of the bed and
free. Also be sure the bed itself is in good shape.

I'm suspecting if you have sharpened or readjusted the knives the real
problem is that the chipbreaker or pressure bar is too low and the
workpiece is binding there. It should be just a fraction above the
knives.

HTH...