Sharpening Dewalt 735 Planer Blades
Benchtop planers, also known as thickness planers, are box-shaped power tools with rotating blades inside that allow you to adjust the thickness of a piece of wood. By passing the wood through the planer, two dewalt Hand tools or three high-speed blades inside the machine cut off tiny layers from the surface of the workpiece. By adjusting the cutting height, you can remove a layer at a time until the wood meets your specifications.
Actually got this, and a bench top drill press and made $100. A big draw for me was that there are no worries about sharpening or replacing knives – just rotate individual cutterhead. The Shelix cutterhead is a premium 3rd party upgrade. It’s completely optional, and the added cost seems inline with how much it costs to step up from plain knives to helical-style insert cutters in larger woodworking machines. The potential benefits of a Shelix head include 1) reduced snipe tear-out, especially in figured woods, 2) longer-lasting sharpness, 3) easier cutting edge rotation and replacement.
We applied blue chalk to the surface of the boards in order to improve our visual inspection combined with a physical inspection to rank the surface finish for each planer. For this evaluation we wanted to look at how accurately the planers remove a specified depth. Each planer has a dial that when turned a specified amount will theoretically dewalt Hand tools remove a given depth in a single pass. We compared how accurately each planer was able to remove a fixed depth based on the dial. We measured the no-load feed rate of each planer and compared that to the feed rates under load for different material types. In our opinion this provides a sense of how powerful the motors are.
Because snipe is a matter of leverage, it can be complicated to avoid. Planers use overhead rollers before and after the cutterhead to hold the workpiece as flat as possible while giving the cutterhead something to register against the board. These rollers work incredibly well in the middle of the board, but not so well at the leading dewalt accessories or tail end when only one roller is touching the wood. Due to gravity, the long end of the board can cause enough leverage to lift the section inside the planer into the cutterhead just slightly, removing more material than you intended. Your planer’s capacity, or allowance, is the major factor determining its capability.
Do you happen to know if this is an updated version of the same model? If so, are the newer ones only sold by certain retailers? In my initial comments about my DW735, I failed to mention that I purchased as a used unit.
I haven’t changed knives yet, but byrd makes a shelix head for the 744; depending on how long I get from the knives I might make the switch next year. I just put a garbage can behind the planer stand and sweep up whatever the can doesn’t catch. I also had to switch the blades but don’t remember it being that much of a pain. Other than that I agree with you, especially about the noise.