planer thicknesser

[Sapper]

I'm only a small time hobby woodworker and sometime in the future I'd like to think I could buy a planer thicknesser. This would only be for the very occasional use and being a pensioner on a very limited budget I couldn't afford a lot. I notice Screwfix do a Titan one at about £180 would this do or is it rubbish?

Appreciate your help and advice.

 

[clogs]

sapper....
was u a....sapper....?
u haven't much to loose at that price plus Screwfix gives a good warranty....
guess it'll do a reasonable job....

 

[Fitzroy]

I think it will depend on your expectations. If you are trying to flatten and square up boards that are 1-3' long and an inch or two thick then you can likely get it working acceptably. If you are trying to get 6' long boards, that are 4" thick, totally true then I think the beds are too short and the machine too light weight, so it'll frustrate you more than help you. Also my experience with any machine is it takes some time to workout how to get the best out of it. Screwfix have a good warranty so if you really find it is not up to task be ready to take it back.

 

[Sapper]

Thanks for your thoughts and tips I appreciate you only get what you pay for perhaps I ought to wait until I can afford something a little better. It seems Machine Mart do one that's about £300 which seems to get good reviews

 

[Spectric]

I'm only a small time hobby woodworker and sometime in the future I'd like to think I could buy a planer thicknesser.

Do you really need one, in your position I would look at buying your wood already planed from a decent wood yard and invest my time in the making rather than the wood preparation.

 

[Sapper]

Iv'e got quite a few, probably 20 or so 3ft lengths of 3"x3" semi planned timber which is not truly square. I'm not too sure what it is but it's a fairly hard soft wood. I'm sure I could come up with a few projects for this once it's truly prepared.

 

[Jameshow]

I wouldn't unless you want to be deaf!

I'd buy a second hand kity / DeWalt / EB machine.

You should get one for £300.

 

[DavidConnelly]

Cant go far wrong with one of these

 

[sams93]

I'm only a small time hobby woodworker and sometime in the future I'd like to think I could buy a planer thicknesser. This would only be for the very occasional use and being a pensioner on a very limited budget I couldn't afford a lot. I notice Screwfix do a Titan one at about £180 would this do or is it rubbish?

Appreciate your help and advice.

I have the screwfix titan one and whilst it has VERY mixed reviews online, I went ahead and bought it on the basis that it has a decent warranty and screwfix will take it back if it isn’t square or I’m not happy etc for any reason, so I thought it was a no risk approach to try it out.


The thicknesser works great, no complaints. I get a very small amount of snipe about 1 inch into the end of the board, but it’s very minor and easily sanded out.

The planer fence straight from the box is absolutely awful. It’s a piece of bent pressed steel, and it isn’t flat nor sturdy. I thought about a complicated all singing all dancing solution for this, and some people have made various modifications online to good success. In the end I simply replaced it with a piece of varnished 3/4 Baltic birch ply, which I’ve set to square and leave it as is. No problems at all since, took me 30 mins to do and now it’s a useful tool.

I reduce the dust extraction ports down to 50mm (as my dust extraction is through a cyclone which has a 50mm opening, so no benefit from running a 100mm hose), I find that extraction is good when planing boards <150mm, any larger than that it is ok but there is a bit of cleaning up to do afterwards. I’m not sure if it would work better with a HVLP 100mm system (which is what it is supposed to be used with!)

If mine broke tomorrow I would buy one again. As and when I can afford a bigger workshop then one day I will try and pick up a larger used planer/thicknesser, but until then I’m happy with this one!

 

[mr rusty]

I echo what @sams93 says. As a cheap thicknesser it's OK, as a jointer/planer it's fairly carp - the tables are on the flimsy side and easy to pull out of alignment. However, I've put loads and loads and loads of timber through mine - it's a bit modified. I ditched the horrible plastic guard, made a plywood box guard, tie-wrapped the safety micro which the guard activates. I use a mask and let the chips fall. Clean them up afterwards with a shovel and plastic bag, followed by my shop vac. Just didn't have anything that would cope with the huge volumes it produces.

I also extended the thicknesser bed with a piece of 18mm ply, which helps to control the snipe as you lead the timber in. Don't be greedy - a 1mm pass is enough, and 0.5mm better. I regularly whip the side off and oil the plain bearings. Setting the blades up is a bit of a PITA (and not obvious how to do it - you think the hex heads clamp the blades, but they don't they unscrew against the blade pushing it tight (so are turned the opposite way to what you intuitively might try). However, set-up with care I get about 0.1 maybe 0.2mm tolerance across a wide board, which is good enough for me.

I'm on the third set of blades now - they last quite well - these fit Erbauer Planer Thicknesser Blades 210mm 2 Pack

and it's VERY noisy - DO where ear protectors.

 

[sams93]

I echo what @sams93 says. As a cheap thicknesser it's OK, as a jointer/planer it's fairly carp - the tables are on the flimsy side and easy to pull out of alignment. However, I've put loads and loads and loads of timber through mine - it's a bit modified. I ditched the horrible plastic guard, made a plywood box guard, tie-wrapped the safety micro which the guard activates. I use a mask and let the chips fall. Clean them up afterwards with a shovel and plastic bag, followed by my shop vac. Just didn't have anything that would cope with the huge volumes it produces.

I also extended the thicknesser bed with a piece of 18mm ply, which helps to control the snipe as you lead the timber in. Don't be greedy - a 1mm pass is enough, and 0.5mm better. I regularly whip the side off and oil the plain bearings. Setting the blades up is a bit of a PITA (and not obvious how to do it - you think the hex heads clamp the blades, but they don't they unscrew against the blade pushing it tight (so are turned the opposite way to what you intuitively might try). However, set-up with care I get about 0.1 maybe 0.2mm tolerance across a wide board, which is good enough for me.

I'm on the third set of blades now - they last quite well - these fit Erbauer Planer Thicknesser Blades 210mm 2 Pack

and it's VERY noisy - DO where ear protectors.

I have found that my cyclone (50mm hose) + shop extractor (which is a 'bin' style vaccum) is fairly effective for it. On narrower boards it is maybe 98% effective at removing the chips, on wider ones maybe 80-85%. I did try it without extraction but found that my small workshop space rapidly filled up with chips - so thats not for me!

Agree that 0.5-1mm passes are best, get a very good finish from a final 0.5mm pass. It doesn't really like doing >1mm passes on full width boards, but on narrower boards <150mm it can take more.

I have had mine for maybe a year now, I haven't changed the blades yet, and I have sent a range of things through it, including a large old reclaimed external porch. I cant comment on how easy it is to change the blades though as I say I haven't done it. The method for fixing the blades into the cutterblock is the same as the other lunchbox thicknessers etc as @mr rusty describes.

 

[recipio]

At the risk of stating the obvious these benchtop thicknessers will not square up the wood. You need to plane the wood against a right angle fence, then thickness it. A secondhand planer / thicknesser would be a better buy.

 

[sams93]

At the risk of stating the obvious these benchtop thicknessers will not square up the wood. You need to plane the wood against a right angle fence, then thickness it. A secondhand planer / thicknesser would be a better buy.

There have been some photos of lunchbox thicknessers in the thread, but the model we are discussing is a planer thicknesser: Titan TTB579PLN 204mm Electric Planer Thicknesser 230V

 

[recipio]

There have been some photos of lunchbox thicknessers in the thread, but the model we are discussing is a planer thicknesser: Titan TTB579PLN 204mm Electric Planer Thicknesser 230V

Sorry, my mistake. My first P/T in the 1980's was an Elu 8 " model. It was fine for a few months until the plastic gear wheels gave up. I thought it was a poor design feature from a company like Elu. After that I got a Scheppach HMS 260 still going fine today. I'd advise the op to look for one secondhand as they are bulletproof.

 

[Allen Quay]

I'm only a small time hobby woodworker and sometime in the future I'd like to think I could buy a planer thicknesser. This would only be for the very occasional use and being a pensioner on a very limited budget I couldn't afford a lot. I notice Screwfix do a Titan one at about £180 would this do or is it rubbish?

Appreciate your help and advice.

There’s quite a few video reviews of the Titan Planer Thicknesser on YouTube, which you might find helpful. I’d like to get one of the Clarke ones from Machine Mart (for occasional hobby use), but I can’t afford one at the moment.

 

[sams93]

There’s quite a few video reviews of the Titan Planer Thicknesser on YouTube, which you might find helpful. I’d like to get one of the Clarke ones from Machine Mart (for occasional hobby use), but I can’t afford one at the moment.

The clarke ones are the same as the titan one?

Even the manual is identical - the fences are the same as except the 254mm clarke one has a different fence to the titan (but still same fence adjustment and attachment as the titan, the dust extraction shroud has a minor difference in shape, and the pieces of plastic are red rather than yellow?

 

[accipiter]

Iv'e got quite a few, probably 20 or so 3ft lengths of 3"x3" semi planned timber which is not truly square. I'm not too sure what it is but it's a fairly hard soft wood. I'm sure I could come up with a few projects for this once it's truly prepared.

Got any cabinet makers or joinery shops near you? If so one of them may be willing to true them up for you at a nominal cost. That would be my first avenue of pursuit unless you really feel the need to do it yourself (more satisfying for sure).

 

[Rodpr]

I have the Titan planer thicknesser and, although I have always been happy with its performance as a thicknesser I had a lot of trouble getting the infeed and outfeed tables co-planar so it was not much use as a planer/jointer. Now, however, I have sorted out the problem. The infeed table is supported by four 'top-hat' washers which run in slots in the body of the machine, allowing the height of the infeed table to be adjusted. The problem was that, to get the infeed table coplanar with the outfeed table, the 'outboard' pair of top hat washers (one of which the locking handle passes through at the back) needed to be about 1mm higher than their slots would allow (see photo).

 

[Rodpr]

Luckily, at the 'Men's shed' in Exmouth we have a very talented engineer who was able to make me up some 'eccentric' top hat washers with the cylinder offset a different amount from each side (approx 0, 0.5, 1.5 an 2mm). He made up a pair of 'oversize' washers (with a 12mm square base instead of 10mm) and then milled the sides down different amounts to get the ecetric washers. When I put these in, with the 0mm clearance at the top, the infeed table lined up nicely.

It would be nice if Titan provided washers like this in the first place - providing a degree of adjustment by turning them around - but they are producing as cheaply as possible, I guess.

 

[Jacob]

Cheapo thicknessers are much more useful of you also get good at hand planing to make up for the deficiencies. Big pieces might be the only way - hand plane two sides square and then machine the other two.