With your budget you should be able to get a nice Sedgwick PT255, which has if memory serves a 10” width and about 8” thickness capability. This is usually more than adequate for most things. you will probably be looking at a green coloured machine, these are the earlier machines, next in the colour scheme came light blue and blue and the latest are white and blue. Earlier machines I don’t believe come with a dust extraction chute, however, they are easy to make out of a bit of ply. You can buy a new one from Sedgwick, but all spares from Sedgwick tend to be on the pricy side. Having said that, the PT255 has remained intrinsically the same, so they will have spares of anything that needs fixing.
The machine is very nicely designed, it has solid cast iron structure to everything that’s important. This not only makes it very rigid, but also damps down any vibration improving the finished surface. I have played with none commercial grade machines that have only a fabricated cabinet and the tables are bolted to that. In my experience they are never sufficiently ridged to keep the surfacing tables coplaner. Unfortunately I believe some of the Sedgwick PT’s have moved recently in this direction which IMO is a retrograde step.
Anyway, the things to check are that the tables are all flat, no hollows or bumps. A very tiny variance is always going be there, but, tables can get worn due to usage. If they are flat, they can be adjusted to get them coplaner and parallel with the cutter block.
The main things that wear are the bearings in the spindle and the oilite bushes on the infeed and outfeed rollers.
Getting the belt and chain which drive the spindle and rollers to run properly can be tricky and very time consuming. Often the idler is in the wrong way around. Equally the belt pulleys can have lost their crown / remachined incorrectly.
Some Photos:
The main belt pulley, you can see it’s worn, there is a ridge on the edge. I had to remachine the crown to get it to run correctly. A spare is available from Sedgwick otherwise.
One of the blocks that holds the infeed / outfeed rollers. You can see inside the scoring. The roller actually had a large wobble making it very difficult to set it correctly to drag the stuff through. This needs / was replaced.
This is the mechanism of the PT. it’s from a forum members machine I serviced. The flat belt is just hanging loose (work in progress) but it should be around a pulley behind the chain on the motor. The sprockets the chain drives can also be worn. These are worn, but still a little life left in them. They should have very rounded tips, worn sprockets have sharp tips. The sprockets and chain will need replacing when they are too badly worn.
This is the rise and fall mechanism for the cast iron thicknessing table. Good robust system that just needs cleaning ever now and again.
The bottom of the all cast cabinet that contains the mechanism. You can see that Sedgwick use good beefy castings, the central column that supports the thicknesser table goes through the central hole. Your looking at the bottom of it, which you would ordinarily never see.
The following was I believe a Green Machine, which is a friends. We took it apart serviced it stripped it and repainted it in the latest colours. It looked like new. Hardly any wear at all in the machine.
