I have a Delta 12.5" planer, and it's worked fine for the few years that I've had it. However, recently the feed rate has for some reason slowed way down... not sure what's going on here, but now I often have to push boards through with a little force rather than having the planer take care of it. I don't think (?) the blades are dull in that I don't get much by the way of nicks or tearout. Any ideas as to what might have gone wrong, and how I can fix it?
Thanks.
Feed rollers may need cleaning or adjusting.
Maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. Check your rubber rollers. Clean them with alcohol. Use paste wax on the stainless platen bed. Make sure the airflow to your dust collector is not being blocked and is adequate. The drive is chain driven, so that is not the problem (unless you are finding the whole thing slowing down, which would be a really bad thing).
By the way, clean all the parts, in addition to the raising and lowering mechanism. I had sawdust in the chain under the plainer that bound up the mechanism so bad that I could hardly raise and lower it.
I would suggest you take a good look at the blades. The blades and the = roller exert force in opposite directions on the wood. As the blades = dull, their force on the wood increases. Sooner or later you will rip up = the roller surfaces.
--=20 SwampBug
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Thanks.
reason
Unplug it, raise it all the way up, wax the feed table, and clean the roller so it gets some of its tackiness back. I believe I've used denatured alcohol in the past.
Different woods have different friction. White oak seems to be really slipperly and won't always feed right, while cherry goes right through.
Check in this order.
Try wasxing the infeed and outfeed tables and tray below the blades, obviously UNPLUG the planner, raise the cutter head to maxium and be carful waxing below the cutter head.
Also while you have it raised, inspect the feed rollers and see if they need cleaning.
Alan
I had the exact same problem with my makita 12" planer. All boards had to be pushed through. After changing to a new set of blades I thought I had a new planer. Even though the blades seemed sharp, evidently they were not sharp enough.
Whether it was caused this way or some other, the middle of the roller on my
12 1/2" Delta Planer has gotten kinda chewed up. Any guidance on how difficult putting a new one in is? Perhaps I'll be lucky and the responses will convince me that it is just better to replace the whole thing with something like the new Delta?Sorry, can't help you there, i have a Delta 12" with chewed up rollers = (from dulled blades) rusting under a table. I replaced mine with a DW735!
--=20 SwampBug
- - - - - - - - - - - -
12 1/2" Delta Planer has gotten kinda chewed up. Any guidance on how=20 difficult putting a new one in is? Perhaps I'll be lucky and the = responses=20 will convince me that it is just better to replace the whole thing with=20 something like the new Delta?--=20 SwampBug
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Thanks.
I agree whole heartedly. I've had two of these units and got tired of taking them apart and either replacing parts or making adjustments or greasing/cleaning. I finally got rid of the toys and have a real 3 HP 15" planer. What a difference. There is no substitute for cubic inches - sorry. Mark
replying to dhyde44, sundance wrote: My 12 1/2 inch delta planer would not feed unless I pushed the stock though and then pulled from the out-feed side. Cleaned the rollers with lacquer thinner and rag, and simonized the bed. It now works like it was new again. Remarkable!
Have to do the same thing to my grrippers periodically.
For those paying attention, alcohol (any kind) generally works as well, and, depending upon the material, might be less likely to harm the rollers.
The best thing I've found for cleaning rubber rollers is pretty odd stuff: blanket wash solvent. This is used in printing plants to clean and recondition the rubber blankets used in the offset printing process. I worked at a place where we had literally hundreds of tape recorders and this solvent was used to clean and recondition the rubber pinch rollers. Worked a treat. The only downside is that it is only available in large containers but we use the expedient of going to the local newspaper's printing plant and simply asking for a pint bottle to be filled. My boss always did that and I don't know if he was using any sort of inducements but he always came back with some. Fortunately my present planer uses a serrated metal infeed roller and a 'frosted' metal outfeed and doesn't take a lot to clean.
Yep. Hired on to do some part time grunt work in the college printing facility as a student .. before I snapped to making more money running a weekly poker game/shooting pool. ;)
IIRC, that stuff was likely aromatic solvent based ... maybe naphthalene? ... because it smelled like moth balls to me, a chemistry major.
Used 99% isopropyl alcohol on all my recording studio tape deck rubber rollers for over 25 years and never had to replace one. Was also excellent for cleaning the recording heads, and was inexpensive at the corner drug store. But even that could also get expensive cleaning offset printing equipment.
+1
Where I work we (used to) have 40 or so super density 32-track reel-to-reel recorders for 512 Mb/sec astronomy data. I had always been told that alcohol was bad news for capstans and rollers (will eventually crack the rubber), but the recorder operators used essentially pure isopropyl to wipe everything clean every few hours. Those recorders were finicky, but the parts never failed due to the cleaning solution. When we upgraded the technology, it was somewhat sad seeing all those half million dollar units put to pasture in the auction yard and selling for a few $ each.
-BR
I lost count.... actually I'm quite certain it would've been impossible to actually count the number of tape heads and pinch rollers and capstans and other video and audio tape recorder parts I cleaned in my previous tenure as a broadcast technician and facilities manager at a college that taught field and studio audio and video production.
I'm not sure where the old legend about rubbing alcohol drying up the rubber parts of tape recorders got started or how it got so vastly spread, but in my experience the alcohol would actually soften up rollers that got too hard and slick and let the tape slip. That would get you another few hours of recording until you could replace the rollers, which is what should be done before they even get to that point.
However, the real problem with using isopropyl alcohol to clean parts of tape recorders was when the alcohol would drip down into lubricated bearings of guide rollers or capstans. The alcohol would dry up the the lube lickety split and cause premature failure.
This wasn't much of an issue for vertically mounted tape recorders like reel-to-reel audio multi-track machines, but it was a big concern for horizontal video tape recorders simply because of gravity.
One of the best inventions ever made to stimulate the consumer VCR repair industry was the head cleaning cassette tape. This was the cassette with cloth tape and a hole where you squirted liquid head cleaner into, then "played" the tape in your VCR to clean the heads and parts. When the dampened tape ran through the capstan and pinch roller, they both acted like an old wringer washer and squeezed all the alcohol out from the cloth which immediately ran down into the bearings and dried them out. I recognized that squeak and could diagnose the problem without even opening up the machine.
I would use those head cleaning tapes for emergency cleanings of the camcorders under my charge, but I would always make sure they were standing up vertically first.
The stuff we used was definitely 'aromatic solvent' and petroleum-based but it did not seem to contain naphthalene. Actually it smelled pretty pleasant to me. We used alcohol for cleaning heads and guides but found it less effective at softening and taking the glaze off of pinch rollers than the blanket wash.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.