7 Best Dewalt Planers Reviews For Serious Woodworkers
The automatic carriage stop feature clearly solves this long standing design issue for planers. I can only hope that DEWALT continues offering this great product for many years to come. Material removal gauge and extra-large thickness scale deliver accurate cuts with every pass. 19-3/4″ cast aluminum base is 2X more rigid than a standard 10″ base and folding tables. Fan-assisted chip ejection vacuums chips off of the cutter-head and exhausts them out of the machine. If it were me, I would use the continuity part of your tester and go thru each switch/device, from power cord to motor and see where the problem is.
This is where the depth setting dial comes in really handy. The depth setting dial has several incremental depth stops at standard measurements from 1/8th of an inch to 1-1/4 inches. This feature was a major help when we needed to plane several reclaimed oak boards for a desktop down to 1-1/4 thick. If I ever get the shop cleaned out and make enough room I’m going to get a Grizzly 15″ and put a Byrd cutterhead on it. That will be about $1,800.00, but it should be the last planer I ever need and years before I have to spend money on replacement carbide inserts. I have a jointer with a helical head and one of the greatest things is it’s very quiet.
A thickness scale and a separate material removal gauge make it easy to set the 734 for the right depth of cut. When I slide a workpiece to the cutter-head carriage, I use the material removal gauge to set the carriage height for the desired cut. There is also an adjustment wheel marked in 1/64″ increments to move the carriage. The carriage itself has a lock bar that positively locks to the four columns and controls snipe, a deeper cut at the beginning and end of a board, a common planer problem. There is also a turret depth stop to set frequently used thicknesses for uniformity among projects.
Bought this when Woodcraft ran the sale with a router thrown in. Recently unboxed them both and used them to build storage units with my daughter. 735X and 735 models have multiple speeds allowing you to set 96 cuts per inch for dimension cuts and 176 cuts per minute for finishing. The final finish is smoother even when handling extremely rough pieces of lumbar with a single run. 734 has a single-speed gearbox limited to 96 cuts per inch. A fourth difference between them is that the DW734 comes with infeed and outfeed tables.
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