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The recent comment made on the drum sander thread, that the person would not be without their drum sander, got me thinking - the greatest advantage of a drum sander over a planer is that figured woods can be thicknessed without tearout. I "toothed" a plane iron on an extra #4 hand plane I had to do this same thing, using a Dremel and a thin cut off wheel. I'm wondering if this might work for the blades of a bench top planer and if anyone has tried this. Since the infeed and outfeed rollers are closer together and the cutterhead is of a smaller diameter they seem to do a better job of planing wood thinner (than a larger machine) without having it for breakfast.

Clay

Interesting idea. If the "grooves" in all 3 blades (4?) did not line up, things are moving fast enough down there that I think it would act like a straight bladed tool. Maybe the way to do it would be to pass a piece of wood through it with little nail points sticking up at regular intervals to get the chips out of the blades to line up

Ed M

I hadn't considered that Ed, you are probably right. It might not be worth doing. If I decide to try it I will use an extra set of blades and line them up and tooth them before they are installed in the planer. With the hand plane I just dremeled small closely spaced cuts rather than chips.
Sometimes it is nice to bounce ideas off the forum, to see if anyone has experience doing something similar and to get a feel for just how bad an idea it might be.

A Shelix cutterhead sort of does the same thing, but with staggered shearing cutters rather than staggered grooves in solid knives. I've had one on my jointer for years, and it handles extremely figured wood with ease and no tearout. Haven't ever sprung the bucks to put one on my planer though--I'm so used to using a thickness sander.

Dave

What was Crazy Idea #21920, Clay?

#21920? I know there was one, but it must have been so fleeting I don't remember what it was. But then, that seems to apply to a lot of things these days.

I don't know how fast those things turn, but do you need to worry about altering the balance of the cutter head if all the blades don't turn out the same?
Just be careful.

_________________
Jim Watts
http://jameswattsguitars.com