Dewalt Planers
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.
What you should know though is that the Dewalt DW735 and the Dewalt DW735X are basically the same thickness planer. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. We ran several dewalt Hand tools different species of hardwoods through including ash, reclaimed oak, and mahogany. The planer worked remarkably well and at 15 amps, it had plenty of power to pull through and plane each hardwood without any hesitation. We planed nearly 70ft of 2-inch mahogany to 1-1/2 inch without overloading the system at all.
On the 734 you push a bar up and down to engage and disengage the lock. Personally I don’t find it arduous to manually deal with the carriage lock on my 734. I also haven’t seen the carriage lock make much difference with snipe. For me, snipe prevention has mostly been a matter of supporting the wood on the way in and the way out of the planer. One surface planer tip I use for accurate thickness pointer adjustment . Plane a 2′ board, cut off the snipe, cut into 4 pieces(3″+/-) and using a scale/caliper, a 3/4″ setting should yield 3″ stacked, exactly!
The prior owner did not have a dust collector and he obviously had run some wood through it planing across the grain. This procedure throws out long fibers of wood rather than chips. The discharge chute was quite clogged when I first used it.
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.
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.