We love this planer, but go through blades fast and they are pricey to replace. If you previously registered for the discussion board but had not made any posts, your membership may have been purged. Secure your membership in this community by joining in the conversations.
What did surprise us was the 2nd and 3rd place finishes of the Triton TPT125 and the Ridgid R4331. If you’re looking for a good performing affordable planer the Triton is certainly worth noting. Ridgid has a nice line of woodshop tools that go unnoticed often and it was nice to see them perform so well in this category. Lastly we measured the time to do a blade change on these planers. Changing blades is a necessary task for any thickness planer so we wanted to see how they compared. After playing around with the planer shortly after assembling this setup I completely eliminated snipe.
For example, a cutterhead speed of 8,000 on a two-blade cutterhead will produce a cutting speed of 16,000 cuts per minute. These machines rip off and spit out tiny pieces of wood, and the floor under a thickness planer will resemble a child’s sandbox after only a few boards. Planers with built-in gauges will allow dewalt Hand tools you to quickly determine the height of the cutterhead from the planer’s deck. This measure expresses how thick a piece of wood will be once it passes through the planer. It won’t go any lower than your depth stop will allow. Your planer’s capacity, or allowance, is the major factor determining its capability.
Personally I can’t see buying a helical head for a portable planer. If you’re going to invest that much money it’s not much more to get a “real” 15″ planer. I ended up with a Delta and the blades were only about $40.00 a set at the dewalt accessories time. Thankfully I stocked up as they’ve gone up a good bit since. However, I had to send the first planer back due to a quality control issue at the factory. The belt pullys were misaligned and ate the belt in about 10 minutes.
Our goal is to provide readers with honest, objective information based on our own experiences. We never have and never will accept payment in exchange for a positive review. Many of the products that we review are provided to us for free by a manufacturer or retailer. In some cases, we also have advertising dewalt accessories or affiliate relationships with manufacturers and retailers of products and services we review. For additional information please visit our additional disclosure policies. It’s extremely important that the in-feed and out-feed tables are level in order to have consistent and representative tests.
I’ve never had it come off during use even when my collection bag was full. The CMEW320 is a solid two-blade planer that provides adequate stock removal and is targeted for those new to power tools. The 96 CPI setting will cut through the wood faster, but it will also leave a rougher surface.
One thing that DeWalt has done with the DW735 is add a built in blower for clearing wood shavings from the blades. It has a surprising amount air flow, and if used without some type of dust collector, it will shoot wood shavings everywhere. It does a wonderful job at keeping dust and shavings from building up on the blades, thus lengthening their life.
The DeWalt DW735 is a perfect upgrade from the lower powered benchtop planer, and very effectively bridges the gap to professional shop machinery. We’re not quite ready to open a mill workshop, but this planer does everything that we’ve asked of it and has performed admirably. It’s very easy to make small depth changes because of the oversize hand wheel. Each full revolution of the wheel changes the depth of the cut by 1/16th of an inch, which enables the user to easily make depth changes to even a 1/64th of an inch with a quarter turn. The DeWalt DW735 comes with a handy Allen wrench that you use for loosening the screws for the plastic cover of the cutter head and the blades themselves. Also, we thought it was kind of cool that the Allen wrench includes a couple of magnets on the handle for easy removal of the blades.