Kittyhawk
Established Member
I have a couple of hand planers plus a few other power tools courtesy of my son.
He doesn't give them to me as as such - I retrieve them from his workshop rubbish bin when we go to visit. He is not a professional woodworker but nonetheless a skilled one and I'd be glad to claim a couple of his projects as my own work but my God, is he hard on power tools. He is seemingly blind to or rather deaf to the sound of some tool screaming its head off in agony as he overloads it beyond its endurance up to the point where it expires in a haze of smoke. But he's not biased against power tools - any mechanical contrivance he gets his hands on is equally at risk. Hard to understand because in everything else he is a gentle, caring man.
So I retrieve and repair them, usually nothing more than replacing the destroyed bearings and that's how come I have a couple of Makita planers that I don't need.
Once in a while I feel obligated to have a go with the thing but I don't understand electric planers at all. Their purpose appears to be the ability to remove a lot of wood quickly when a length of timber needs dressing down to size. But if that's the case, why not just cut the piece properly down to size on the bench saw and clean up the saw cut with an ordinary hand plane?
Recently I needed to bevel a few lengths of one metre long by 45mm thick pine. I tried the Makita planer again but gave it up because I could do it faster, easier and more accurately using my old Stanley Bailey.
Half the world is probably using power planers without problems but they don't work for me so I reckon these electric jobs are going back into the rubbish bin, where they belong.
He doesn't give them to me as as such - I retrieve them from his workshop rubbish bin when we go to visit. He is not a professional woodworker but nonetheless a skilled one and I'd be glad to claim a couple of his projects as my own work but my God, is he hard on power tools. He is seemingly blind to or rather deaf to the sound of some tool screaming its head off in agony as he overloads it beyond its endurance up to the point where it expires in a haze of smoke. But he's not biased against power tools - any mechanical contrivance he gets his hands on is equally at risk. Hard to understand because in everything else he is a gentle, caring man.
So I retrieve and repair them, usually nothing more than replacing the destroyed bearings and that's how come I have a couple of Makita planers that I don't need.
Once in a while I feel obligated to have a go with the thing but I don't understand electric planers at all. Their purpose appears to be the ability to remove a lot of wood quickly when a length of timber needs dressing down to size. But if that's the case, why not just cut the piece properly down to size on the bench saw and clean up the saw cut with an ordinary hand plane?
Recently I needed to bevel a few lengths of one metre long by 45mm thick pine. I tried the Makita planer again but gave it up because I could do it faster, easier and more accurately using my old Stanley Bailey.
Half the world is probably using power planers without problems but they don't work for me so I reckon these electric jobs are going back into the rubbish bin, where they belong.
