Snipe Management
Written: Mar 09 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Inexpensive, Portable, Leaves surface very smooth, Quiet (for a planer)
Cons: Snipes!
The Bottom Line: A great, inexpensive planer that produces an excellent surface. If you're willing to practice simple "Snipe Management" techniques you will be happy with it.
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| vertibird's Full Review: Delta Shopmaster Portable Planer TP300 |
I purchased this planer because I do light woodworking and furniture making and I have a small shop and a smaller budget. Setup was easy, the planer comes out of box almost ready to go. The manual says the blades need to be cleaned with kerosene before use, but I couldn't get a hold of any kerosene, so I used paint thinner, which worked fine.
Overall, the planer works very well. The blades were razor-sharp when new (I sliced my thumb open cleaning them, doh!) and produced a beautiful surface on any hardwood stock I ran throught the machine, almost ready to finish. Just needed some light sanding/scraping to remove the faint cuttermarks.
However, the planer does leave snipes. What's a snipe, you ask? Well, like most planers, the cutterhead and feed rollers are mounted upside down on an adjustable carriage. The feed rollers are on opposite sides of the cutterhead (before and after), and the carriage rides up and down on a pair of long jackscrews which are driven by a hand crank on top of the machine to set the cutting depth. On more expensive planers, the carriage has a jackscrew at all four corners, which makes the cutterhead very stable. The Delta, however has only two jackscrews, on the right and left sides of the carriage, which means the carriage can wobble very slightly back and forth. So what happens when you insert a piece of wood into the planer is this: When the wood enters the first roller, it tilts the carriage slightly forward, the wood then hits the cutterhead, which starts planing, then it hits the second feed roller, which lifts the other side of the carriage, raising the cut depth slightly. As the end of the board passes through the planer the opposite happens. When it clears the first roller, the carriage drops back down a bit and the cutter goes deeper. What you end up with are two, very slight two-inch wide "steps" on each end of the board. I was pretty frustrated at first. I tried adjusting the infeed and outfeed tables with no luck. There is no way to adjust the height of the feed rollers. So I finally checked the Delta website FAQ and found out that this phenomenon is called "Snipe". And Delta allows .005 to .009" inches of it, and there is nothing you can do. Hmph.
It's not so bad though. I found you can reduce the size of the snipe by making the last couple of passes through the planer in tiny increments. This reduces the amount that the wood lifts the carriage. Another good technique is to feed another equal-width board at the beginning and end of the piec you're cutting. As long as they're over 2 inches wide, the snipe ends up on the end pieces, not the main stock, feeding multiple pieces head-to-tail works good too. I also found that gently lifting on the board as it is about to finish cutting reduces the "Tail snipe" considerably. Finally, you can simply plan to lose two inches off the end of every piece you plan on planing, and adjust your initial cuts accordingly.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
vertibird
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Reviews written: 3
Trusted by: 0 members
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