Honest John
Established Member
Today I found it necessary to mill some pallet wood boards for a project to make a craft box for my grand daughter to store her craft bits and pieces. Most of the time I use hand tools, but as I was feeling weary and there was quite a lot to do to later pick out the best parts, I used my planer, to surface one side and an edge square to it. The opposite edge I jointed on my table saw, and I then lifted out my SIP bench top planer thicknesser. As I happen to have a cast iron topped jointer table I only use this dual device in thicknessing mode. Can’t remember the last time I used it, as I like using hand tools. Anyway. I used my JET extractor on each of the three machines, connecting via a 100mm flexible hose. Jointer and table saw were fine, but the thicknesser was blocking every couple of passes. The JET extractor does have a sort of spider at the inlet which blocks sometimes when I use the flex hose to collect dust and shavings at my lathe, but I suppose it’s there to prevent solid lumps hitting the fan blades. I know planers and thicknessers produce a lot of output, but I was finding my set up almost unusable. What is conventional wisdom on addressing this issue. Would some sort of separator be appropriate to collect the shaving near to the machine and keep the longer hose clear? Apologies if this has been covered before. I suspect this may be one of those things that everybody but me knows how to address.