Old Import thickness planer knives

[Marc Britten]

I have an old "Tool Shop" brand thickness planer. Does a good job, but the knives are getting worn bad and I'm at a stand still until they get sharpened.

I was looking around hoping to find replacement blades and I found Freud makes a set for the Ryobi AP10 planer. Looking at the manual its almost identical to mine, however the Freud blades have holes in them and my blades are solid HSS.

Anyone out there familiar with this planer by chance and care to comment on if they think these blades will work?

Thanks,

Marc

[Lew Hodgett]

Not familiar with T/S, but had an AP10 until it was permanently "borrowed".

Simplest and safest thing to do it to take the planer and blades to a sharpening shop and have them identify and probably offer a replacement set of blades.

You will make the trip to get the blades sharpened anyway, so kill two birds with one stone.

Lew

[Garage_Woodworks]

I sharpen my planer blades (12") by myself. It takes about 10 minutes unless they are badly nicked. I took a set of jointer knifes to get sharpened once and they came back looking like the guy sharpened them on the asphault. YOU can do a much better job at home. Give it a try. I sharpen mine after every major project now. (See link below)

[Leon]

Many planer blades are generic and you simply match the size to what you need. The Ryobi AP10 does indeed need a blade with holes to be able to make adjustments. If your blades need no such holes I suspect that these blades would work.

[dpb]

...

Note key item is thickness as that is what the gib design will need to ensure they are adequately held in place.

Other than that, any solid knife of the right dimensions should be fine and the existence of an extraneous hole shouldn't be a problem.

Caution about Freud blades mail order -- I've ordered a set of backup blades thru Amazon on at least three separate occasions and they never arrived -- shipping dates come and go and one eventually misses one of the 'bot missives of "do you still want these?" and the order is then automagically canceled. Try again, same thing 'til I finally just gave up. Mayhaps the problem is resolved; I've not tried for about a year now, but that experience existed over a period of a couple years.

--

[Leon]

Jesada used to sell planer knives, don't know if they still do. I was surprised to see them still around, they had a router bit booth at the Houston WW show last week end.

[Marc Britten]

I found that link earlier searching archives. Thanks - I'm thinking of doing the sharpening myself, but thought it would be handy to have a backup set - and the price looked right. However looking at the dimensions they're twice the width of mine. Thickness is good, but its almost twice as wide as mine are currently.

[Marc Britten]

Thanks for the tip. I plugged them into google and found this site that among other things sells custom knife sizes. A little expensive ($25 cut fee + about $11 per knife) but at least there's hope.

[beecrofter]

What is the thickness of the knife and it's width? most sharpening shops can buy bars and cut them to length for you.

[Marc Britten]

1/8" thick, About 3/4 width. There's one listing for Sharpening Service in my area, I'll give them a call tomorrow.

I suppose I should order a Planer jig for inserting the blades again too. (I bought this used without knowing I was supposed to get some sort of jig with it)

[Marc Britten]

After taking the knives out I found out that theirs a dip in one of them, which is probably why I always had a bunch of sanding to do on the boards that came out of it.

Then, to prove that I'm not as bright as I like to pretend I had been ignoring the "Call for replacement parts" phone number on the manual. Well they have them, for pretty cheap too. I ordered 2 pair, that way I can swap them and sharpen/hone the previous pair.

Thanks for all the advice.

Marc