Best Benchtop Thickness Planer
The overwhelming feeling when opening the box was that the DeWalt DW735 is already a large step up from our previous planer based on build quality alone. The machine sits on a cast aluminum base, and although the casing is molded plastic, it’s solid. Overall, the DeWalt DW735 seems to jump across the line into the professional realm from a small-scale standpoint. You can use them to create consistent thicknesses on several boards for woodworking purposes or to uncover the beauty hidden underneath reclaimed wood.
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 dewalt accessories 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.
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 Hand tools 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.
If you look at the photo above you’ll see that they have connected a chip blower directly to the motor. There is a shroud over the blades which connects to the chip blower. This system works so well that when I removed the cover on the planer there was virtually NO dust inside even after running over a 100 feet of hardwood through the planer already. This is a really good machine, but the only problem with it is that it is exceedingly loud, even with ppe. I ended up buying a little bit less capable, and slightly more expensive, machine only because it was much quieter. I otherwise really like this Dewalt thickness planer.
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” dewalt Hand tools 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”.
The DW734 actually has three blades instead of the DW733’s two. This is a big improvement that helps with cut quality. Simply put, because there are more knives in the cutterhead, they make more frequent contact with the wood. This means there is less of a gap between each ‘hit’ of the blade, leading to a smoother finish. The planer has a 6-inch depth plus a 13-inch width able to handle any large lumber you may have. The thickness scale is also large and clear telling you the exact thickness of your lumber and the allowance for the depth of cut you can make to it.
I’m also noticing the blades are getting huge gouges in them. This article is a troubleshooting guide for problems and malfunctions common to most electric power tools. Own an Ace Store Your ultimate power tool for business success.
For BARBASHELA’s planks we wanted to remove just over a 1/16″ from the rough-sawn boards to reach the target thickness and that required several passes per plank. We set up to remove 1/64″ per pass to reduce the load on the feed rollers and found that the 15-amp, 20,000-rpm motor was up to the task. The 734 has powerful feed rollers and provides 33-1/2″ of support from the infeed and outfeed tables, so it can handle 6′ to 8′ boards. For the 16’ and longer planks we helped push and pull the stock through. An alternative to using power wood planers is using hand planes. The skill required to properly dimension wood with a hand plane takes time to master.