Titan Planer Thicknesser Review (Another "almost, but not quite" from screwfix)

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BearTricks

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I bought one of these a month or so ago against the recommendation of some on this forum.

I think I probably got one of the only ones that was okay out of the box. After a bit of fettling and a fence upgrade I’d managed to plane and thickness a workbench worth of old hard yellow pine absolutely perfectly and I’ve been singing it’s praises ever since.

The fence is now bolted to the side which permanently fixes the infeed table, which doesn’t lock (despite having a locking lever) at 1mm cutting depth. I’ll probably drill some more holes so I can set it at half a mil if I need to.

The dust extraction is useless and frustratingly required to get the thing to start.

So I got my wood planed nicely. Sat on my sawhorses and ready for glue up. I’d actually glued it together in sections big enough to fit through the thicknesser already. My only problem being that each piece had a small raised line across it where the blade in the planer had been dented. I don’t know if it came like that or if I did it but I thought I’d just hand plane it off at the end which I almost did.

Instead, I though “nope this thing has served me well enough, I’ll change the blades and get a nice finish”.

So I bought some sharp new blades, followed a tutorial to change them and set about planing my wood. Looked good so I went to glue it up and once it was too set to pry apart I realised the wood was nowhere close to being straight. I had no idea what had gone wrong so I spent a day yesterday trying to figure out if I’d bent one of the tables or dinged the cutting block.

I finally figured out that the tool used to set the blade in the block was way off. It doesn’t put the blade in straight and as a result I ended up with timber that was worse than when I got it, and being old pine that’s been holding a house up for the past 100 years, it was pretty bad.

I’m now stuck with a glued up mess and will probably have to go back to hand planing to fix it, and/or cut it apart with the track saw, and put it through the planer again.

I think I’m done buying Screwfix own brand. While they have a few diamonds in the rough the quality control is absolutely terrible. I probably should have listened to the forum but I was swayed by a few good reviews and the rose coloured glasses went on as soon as I got it working well.

If anyone finds this thread looking for a recommendation on this tool I’m going to say don’t bother. It was so close but a pretty big quality control issue means all my time spent running out to the workshop in between work meetings for weeks has been completely wasted.
 
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I have one of these titan planer thicknessers. So far touch wood its actually been pretty good. I only use it occasionally, but have used on oak, iroko, chestnut, douglas fir so far. I think these tools are very hit and miss - as you experienced a lot of them seem to come wonky or badly adjusted out of the box - which obviously isnt good. I bought mine even after reading all of the reviews, with the idea that as screwfix are very good at accepting returns if it was rubbish I would just return it, i havent needed to.

I think I have been lucky with my one, the fence could do with an upgrade as it is a bit flimsy, (I have seen a variety of attempts by different people but I might start just by bolting a piece of ply to it).

I am interested to hear you say the extraction was rubbish - I havent experienced that with mine, the extraction has always been ok (not perfect but ok) - i did have to run it last week without the extraction as I am waiting for a replacement hose, and i was shocked at how much flew out of it without the extraction on!

Also you say that there is a lock for the infeed table? I havent come across this yet where did you spot that?


I will caveat all of this by saying I am a DIY user, and that for me the fact that it was so cheap makes it very attractive to me and the idea that i might have to return to get an accurate one was something i had accepted before buying it.
 

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