Dewalt Jointers & Planers
Thanks to its two-blade design, this provides 16,000 cuts per minute, which is enough for most light-duty hobby work. Now that you know how these machines work and what to look out for when choosing the best benchtop planer for your woodshop, check out the following products. These planers are considered among the best in their respective categories. Shaving the intended amount of wood off your workpieces can be tedious.
The Interna-Lok head clamp holds the workpiece in place better than standard rollers, minimizing snipe. Though the 2012NB doesn’t have a built-in dust collection port, dewalt accessories you can buy an attachment separately. The best benchtop planers have dust ports that attach to a shop vacuum or dust collection system to minimize the mess.
This planer has a 12.5-inch-wide board capacity and a 6-inch maximum thickness. The extra half-inch in width provides a little extra room over some of the 12-inch competition. It also allows you to adjust the feed speed of your material which will give you all of the control that you need for your specific cut. Two features I really like are the automatic carriage lock which reduces the movements and helps reduce snipes. It’s a nice feature and one less thing a user has to worry about before making a cut. While this is just a gauge and you still want to rely on the right hand side measurement, this is a nice feature.
To answer your question about my dust collector, I have a 1.5 HP JDS DustForce single stage dust collector and it handles the planer very well. It’s extremely important that the in-feed and out-feed tables are level in order to have consistent and representative tests. The as-shipped accuracy of the tables varied between the different models.We adjusted the in-feed and out-feed tables separately and then checked for dewalt tools level across the entire machine. The worst measured vertical deviation from flat at the edge of the outfeed table nearly 1/8” above the surface of the planer. All of the machines except the DEWALT DW735X needed minor adjustments to reach a level surface. Ultimately the surface finish is really important, especially if the finish reduces the time to prepare the work piece of paint, stain and or clear finishes.
Each piece of wood was started at the first roller of the planer and we left our hands off the sample until it stopped past the outfeed roller. Next blue chalk powder was rubbed onto the last 6” of the board in order to make the snipe condition stand out visually. Most planers have two internal knives that revolve and cut wood. Regardless of the design, all planer dewalt accessories knives bolt to a heavy, spinning component called the cutterhead. Most benchtop planer knives are not designed to be re-sharpened, and that’s a good thing because it makes them easy to deal with. Renewing blades is simply a matter of unbolting the old ones and either flipping them around or replacing them with new, then bolting everything together again.
We don’t want to purchase junk, but don’t have a flowing bank account either. You will want to follow good standard practice of finishing your boards with a few light smoothing cuts with a very sharp, delicately set smooth plane. The motor on this planer can give you 34,000 cuts per minute. It comes with steel blades, but when these get dull, you’re better off getting reversible carbide blades as replacements.
The manufacturer uses quality build materials, and it also offers good customer support. I watched many a video, compare to other planers, and chose the Dewalt 735. I had used one in a woodcraft class and really liked it. I ordered the whole package with the stand and it works very well.
What we do takes so much time as it is, no one pays us to do this, we do it with volunteers and samples. Wish we could offer more, but it’s just not feasible. Did you test whether the planers, especially the 735x can actually handle the full widths they claim? Can you actually put 13″ work through the 735x without it bogging down or, put another way, how thick can the cut be at 13″ without bogging down too much? That would be an excellent test, especially since I think you were starting to see the effect of width with the poplar.