Steve Maskery
Established Member
Hi all,
I have a Kity 637 which has served me well for many years.
My mate Charlie came over yesterday to plane up a load of recycled pallet wood. Yes, I know. He'd checked it all with a metal detector though, and my blades need changing anyway, so I didn't mind too much.
There is miles of this stuff to do. I taught him how to use the machine, how to read the grain and all that stuff, and after a couple of hours I was happy to leave him to it.
Late in the afternoon he switched the machine off and it wouldn't start again. The back panel was very warm to the touch, so the motor much have been red hot. I thought it might just be a thermal overload and would be OK once it got cooler.
But no, this morning there is just a buzz. So I looked for the capacitor, unbolted it and sure enough it had blown. Cheap and easy to fix, but I'm out of action until Wednesday.
So while we had it in service mode we had a closer look at the mechanical bit. It really is a pile of [expletive deleted] tat. You can't easily get any of the gear train off. There is one reducer wheel that you can get off. It is driven by the cutter block and in turn drives the feed rollers, but that is it. I think I have to remove the rollers to get the main drive wheel off. It's pants.
So in mechanical order we have:
Motor pulley at the bottom, which drives the cutter block via a belt.
The cutter block drives another pulley via a second belt. I've not measured it, but say it is 150mm.
This pulley is aluminium and has a small gear wheel on the side.
This gear engages with a second gear, larger again, about 75mm, to reduce the RPM further. The gear has a sprocket on the side which drives a chain which turns the rollers. It's made of plastic. Plastic, I ask you.
Now then, to my point. This has all been built down to a price, The main drive wheel and this plastic thing do not have bearings. At least, the plastic one doesn't, I can't get the big one off without removing the feed rollers (I can remove the spindle but not the pulley itself), but I'm pretty sure it doesn't. The result is that the holes have worn so that these two pulleys are no longer perpendicular to the shafts. There is an inordinate amount of play.
I shall ring NMA tomorrow, but I'm not hopeful as Kity have been dead a long time and I regularly get emails from total strangers asking me if I know where they can get Kity spares!
Assuming I draw a blank, what can I do with my existing parts to improve the fit?
I have a Kity 637 which has served me well for many years.
My mate Charlie came over yesterday to plane up a load of recycled pallet wood. Yes, I know. He'd checked it all with a metal detector though, and my blades need changing anyway, so I didn't mind too much.
There is miles of this stuff to do. I taught him how to use the machine, how to read the grain and all that stuff, and after a couple of hours I was happy to leave him to it.
Late in the afternoon he switched the machine off and it wouldn't start again. The back panel was very warm to the touch, so the motor much have been red hot. I thought it might just be a thermal overload and would be OK once it got cooler.
But no, this morning there is just a buzz. So I looked for the capacitor, unbolted it and sure enough it had blown. Cheap and easy to fix, but I'm out of action until Wednesday.
So while we had it in service mode we had a closer look at the mechanical bit. It really is a pile of [expletive deleted] tat. You can't easily get any of the gear train off. There is one reducer wheel that you can get off. It is driven by the cutter block and in turn drives the feed rollers, but that is it. I think I have to remove the rollers to get the main drive wheel off. It's pants.
So in mechanical order we have:
Motor pulley at the bottom, which drives the cutter block via a belt.
The cutter block drives another pulley via a second belt. I've not measured it, but say it is 150mm.
This pulley is aluminium and has a small gear wheel on the side.
This gear engages with a second gear, larger again, about 75mm, to reduce the RPM further. The gear has a sprocket on the side which drives a chain which turns the rollers. It's made of plastic. Plastic, I ask you.
Now then, to my point. This has all been built down to a price, The main drive wheel and this plastic thing do not have bearings. At least, the plastic one doesn't, I can't get the big one off without removing the feed rollers (I can remove the spindle but not the pulley itself), but I'm pretty sure it doesn't. The result is that the holes have worn so that these two pulleys are no longer perpendicular to the shafts. There is an inordinate amount of play.
I shall ring NMA tomorrow, but I'm not hopeful as Kity have been dead a long time and I regularly get emails from total strangers asking me if I know where they can get Kity spares!
Assuming I draw a blank, what can I do with my existing parts to improve the fit?
