Dewalt Heavy Duty Thickness Planer
In some cases, we also have advertising or affiliate relationships with manufacturers and retailers of products and services we review. For additional information please visit our additional disclosure policies. Thank you for the time and effort put into this comparison. It is very well thought out and informative and provides me a good basis to compare between planers. I noticed that for the Triton planer, your picture differs from the stock photo (on/off switch, for example). I have searched and do not see any images online that represent the one you worked with.
As mentioned earlier, there is a 4” dust port on the back of the planer that makes dust collection a breeze even without a dust collector. I use a short piece of Harbor Freight 4” dust collection hose here. I’ve never had it come off during use even when my collection bag was full. The DW735X model comes with some extras that the DW735 does not. You get an extra set of blades and you get the two support wings that easily attach to the front and rear for added material support. Both of these are great add-ons and worth the added cost.
The more of these we do, the more we learn, and in this evaluation we’ve taken a slightly different approach. Some of the categories that we set out to evaluate we decided not to include in the final ranking. However, we did provide information from that category as we feel it’s valuable to some readers. We applied blue chalk to the surface to highlight the milling marks, and scallops, for a visual inspection. We also evaluated the smoothness by simply feeling the surfaces.
Because the hose enters the rear of the unit it sits directly above boards coming out the finished end of the planer. This means you’ve have to keep the hose lifted up and out of the way so the exiting board doesn’t run into the hose. This is a minor issue but one I’d like to see addressed in the next model. I scored this package with the dewalt planer stand a year or so ago for $599 on one of Home Depots one day deals. If one were interested in a stand, that’s the only comparable or better deal I’ve ever seen on this planer.
He then did some amazing planing with the original blade. All of my old Stanleys still have the original blades. Don’t be in a rush to “upgrade” with a premium blade and chip breaker. Nothing against them; just don’t sell a good original dewalt accessories blade short. Learn how to do David Charlesworth’s ruler trick instead of spending a long time working on the back. The SE-77 square edge jig which came with your T8 has the capability of adding controlled camber to plane blades.
Planers with built-in gauges will allow 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. Funny I was just looking at this model yesterday and almost pulled the trigger. A little big more initially but it has great reviews and the cutter head will be great. While power is extremely important, it can also be extremely hindered by poor accuracy.
While very subjective, we ranked the planers based on the samples of Maple shown below. Above you can see a graphic showing the ratio of the no-load feed rate compared to the average loaded feed rate . This just gives a good relative comparison of how the motors performed under load. The DEWALT 735X and the Triton TPT125 were able to keep the feed rate much closer to the no-load rate compared to the rest of the field. Here I am applying coat of paste wax to the bed of my DEWALT DW735 planer.
One drawback to a straight knife planer is that it provides somewhat rough and inconsistent results. Most straight knife planers are less expensive than those with spiral blades. I found the dealt infeed dewalt accessories and outfeed tables on tale and then mounted this beast to a Rigid miter saw utility vehicle. The cart has rollers on the infeed and outfeed sides so along with the tables you can get great results.
Finishing with the best price is the Porter-Cable PC305PT at $320 and rounding up the most expensive is the Makita 2012NB at $650. Warranties are really important to some users, and many of you have asked us to include them in our reviews. Below is a list of the warranties applicable to the planers we tested. While ranking the warranties might seem simple, we’ve decided to just list them rather than rank them. Ultimately, warranties can be a tough issue, and how easily you can get warranty service is likely to be as important as how many years the coverage is.
The only time it gave me any trouble was when i was planing 10” wide black locust slabs but that’s a tall order for anything that isn’t industrial. Another consideration when evaluating bench-top thickness planer performance is the surface finish. Bench-top thickness planers use a set of rotating blades to “shave” off the surface of the board being planed. The TBB Crew selected the maple wood for the snipe test. We thought the lighter color and tight grain structure of maple might show the location and the depth of any snipes better than the other woods. For this test, we set all of the planers to a uniform depth of 3/32”.