Bench Top Planers Reviews

The jointer bed is too small for this to be the perfect machine. The planer is excellent, but the total length of the infeed and outfeed bed is very short and makes it difficult to accurately joint long pieces of wood. The first thing that I did after buying this was to buy a 71" powermatic jointer. It is not the most economical way to go.

The exhaust tends to get plugged in both the planer and the jointer with wood chips.

The blades for the P12RA are what in trade referred to as "specialized" blades because they have custom slots and holes. Consequently, you are tied into the manufacturer for blades.

Despite reports to the contrary and the failure of these blades to appear in the documentation as parts or accessories, Hitachi does offer carbide blades for P12RA planer and the jointer. The Hitachi part numbers are: planer - 200001 and jointer - 401000. I just ordered both sets from an authorized Hitachi parts supplier, be ready for sticker shock, the MFG list price for the blades are $448.71 for the planer and $224.35 for the jointer as of April 7, 2006. The vendor I purchased from discounted my price to 80% of the list price.

The toll free number to Hitachi Power Tools Customer Service is 800-706-7337.

I've had my Hitachi P12RA planer for 8 years and couldn't be happier. Originally, I wanted to buy their F1000A cast iron planer/jointer but discovered Hitachi no longer exports it to the USA. Since the F1000A is SOOOOOOOOOOOO remarkable, I took the chance on this "little brother" and was very pleased- with the planer.

The quality of cut is outstanding, and boards come out dead accurate. In fact, I go to this planer over my 2 year old Jet 15" stationary planer almost every time. The Jet is a workhorse so that should tell ya something! Setup is simple. The knives are really beefy and all the other parts (castings, chains, bearings, adjusting screws) are heavy and well made. I get "slick-as-glass" results even on ebony. Since most of the components are aluminum alloy or stainless steel, I don't even have to fight rust.

Though the jointer is powerful and gives a fantastic finish to the wood, it's just too simplistic. There isn't a way to align the infeed and outfeed tables, which makes getting a flat board almost impossible. They are fixed except to adjust the depth of cut. In fact, holding a straight edge to the length of the jointer bed reveals both tables angle away from the cutterhead. Since I make guitars, this sort of thing drives me bananas. I actually sent the jointer portion back to the dealer for a partial refund.

My advice is to buy the planer portion only. Spent the money for the dust hood too. It's well put together and very effective. This planer has been featured in several books and magazine articles over the years, and for a good reason. You will be amazed with the results!

Found this awesome, strong table at the Sacramento Woodworking Show. What a buy! It more than lives up to its claims. Great utility, very beefy, nice finish. Adjustable feet makes it very stable. I use it for my chop saws, surface planer, bench grinder and an extra saw horse. So many multiple uses. I just ordered another one for my shop. AND THE PRICE!!?....EXCELLENT VALUE! Easy to assemble in 20 minutes or less. Enjoy yours!

After 3 years of occasional use and a larger than usual amount of repairs, I would rate this planer fair.

I used this planer for mostly hardwoods such as Oak and Maple. I never planed more than 1/16" at one pass on boards ranging from 2" wide up to 12" wide. The wider the board, the less I took off.

I started having problems with feeding short boards into the inlet. The planer appeared to be having problems when the board would make contact with the exit roller. That is when the board would stop for a split second and then be forced forward again by the intet roller.

This uneven feed caused the gear sprockets to break a tooth on the chain drive. The breaks in the sprocket would be specific to the valley area of the gear and would split the sprocket in half causing planer failure. Over the last 3 years I have replaced all the original gear sprockets with newer ones.

Last week I found a hairline crack in the left head area where the motor rests. I believe this hairline fracture opens when a board is being planned causing the jumping.

I have decided to part this machine out and have moved on to a DW734 planer.

This planer had enough power to get the job done, but I believe it has design issues.

I like this planer just fine. However I must admit that this is the only one I have ever used. I had a friend who had a maple tree fall in his yard. We went our and ripped about 40, 12" x 30" x 3" blocks with our chain saws. (without a ripping chain). The blocks were in terrible shape. I have run these through this planner and now have 40 pieces of 1" x12"x30 beautiful marbled maple. I had to run each piece through about 20- 25 times to get all the chain saw marks out. So I would guess that is about 2500 board feet of nasty rock hard maple. NO PROBLEM. This thing is like a ginsui knife, I took one of the pieces and ran it through to see how fine I could finish it, a buddy of mine needed a custom size cutting board for his kitchen cabinet. I hardly need to sand it when I was done. The one problem I had was when I bought it the screw that holds the handle on was not long enough and I stripped the hole, but it stays on with gravity just fine. I Also would like two speeds, as with most of my reviews this is my fault for not spending the money.

You will be hard pressed to find a planer that will do a better job than this DW733. Set up was a snap, maybe an hour to remove from the box and double check all adjustments. If you do the basics - keep knives sharp, in and out tables adjusted properly and provide support for long pieces - this machine will give you great results. Snipe is minimal to non-existant. The dust hood & my 650cfm dust collector eliminates 95% of all chips.

The motor is tough, and won't quit even if you wish it would put itself out of it's own misery.
I gave it 3 stars only because of the price and ease of finding replacement blades, which is better than my experience with DeWalt and Hitachi's returned planers.
Downers are that an 8mm wrench(supplied) is dangerously loose on the 7.5mm blade bolts when you change blades, and frequent slips on the head bolts will slice you up like Freddy Kruger!
But who doesn't like a little blood and gore now and then?
Buy a Craftsman 7mm open-end wrench and grind 0.5mm off one inside edge for blade changes, then tie a dollar to the cheap Delta 8mm wrench (supplied) and heave it into the woods. That way you can say that you actually threw something away !
The old hexagonal-head bolts are still the best clamp-down system for blades, and Delta should not change that. They should simply supply a 7.5mm wrench, or upgrade the bolts to 8 mm for safety's sake.
Wear leather gloves when changing these blades, or you WILL be sorry one day !

After a little dulling of blades, the depth handle moves freely and won't stay put. Keeps you real busy.
Delta blades for this thing don't last very long at all on hardwoods (or heart-woods), but the up-side is that you can buy carbide for this machine before you will buy carbide blades for ANY other 12' to 13" planer in the mainstream market! (Lowes, Home Depot, Ace, Etc.)But of course, the carbide costs about as much as the planer ($200)! LOL !
To date, you cannot buy the replacement drive belt,though advertised, through Amazon. I have had to reconfirm my April order for 3 of them about 6 times now, at pain of cancellation, so I guess we are supposed to throw the machine away when it spins some notches off the rubber belt.
So with mixed emotions I can say,
Thanks Again, Taiwan USA !

I was looking cheap, just to clean up some rough-hewn boards. The bottom-end Lowes had was the TP-305 (12.5" vs TP-300 12.0", otherwise EXACTLY the same) for $199, so I got that.

Into and Basics
First off, the TP-305 is single speed. Fine for my purposes. As someone else said, if you're doing "fine woodworking", you'll sand with high-grit before calling it done.

Everything is metal, and the handle on top doubles as a foam covered transfer roller. It's very solid and stable, you know, for a "portable".

The belt drive is about 3/4", versus about 2" for the Hitachi and DeWalt. Conversely, the belt on the Delta is fiber reinforced black rubber, like a fan belt, rather than being clear, plain rubber.

There is supposedly a chain-drive for gear reduction, but I haven't dismantled it yet to lubricate them.

Setup
Second, it was a snap to prepare. I pulled it out of the box. It's maybe 75 or 80 pounds. OK if you lift right, or 2-person lift otherwise. It included the planer assembly, a dust chute with 2 fasteners, a hex wrench which fits in a slot on top, a magnetic blade tool, and a crank handle with hex-head fastener.

I put it on top of a table. No LRF support, and there was a little flashing on the bottom, so don't unpack this onto a nice table. Something like this should be bolted down. The deck holes are 1/4", one on each corner. I used some washers and deck screws and that was more than enough to keep it stable.

SAFETY PRECAUTIONS
You NEED earplugs. Yes, it is "quiet" compared to some shop planers/jointers, it's still loud. Earmuffs should be OK, but I opted for spongy/expanding 33db earplugs. No problem there, but I was definitely deaf to the world.

Also, goggles are a must. These two things are silly and simple, but just in case you didn't know. This might not be so important if they ever get immunology and organ cloning down, but since you're limited to one set of eyes right now, best protect them from flying debris.

If you want to reach, adjust, oil, or perform ANY maintenance, unplug your machine. "I thought I was safe but something fell and flipped the switch" wouldn't quite cut it with your friends.

ALWAYS operate with the dust chute in place. The motor blows air into it and it sends the chips out the back. Without it, A) You'll be covered in vertically launched curls, and more importantly B) The top of the cutter head will be exposed, which is very not safe.

Keep distractions and horseplay away from this machine. This is not a toy, it's an 8000 RPM spinning blade of doom. No playing. Period. OK? JUNIOR!?!?! Are you LISTENING TO ME! NO PLAYING. Ok. Good. Serious machine.

SNIPER, NO SNIPING!
As a portable planer goes, the fold-out tables are fairly small. I tried using Skill brand roller stands on each side to help hold the workpiece, but this planer loves to snipe on ingress.

Tilt your board down into the planer about 5 degrees, and don't cut deep and you'll limit it. Even so, every board has a 2-3" spot that's maybe 1/32" thinner than the rest of the length.

Egress snipe is alleviated by lifting ever so slightly on the workpiece for the final stretch. If you don't get it, you'll hear the motor change speed as it chews into the end. It's really just the design of the rollers. I think you'd probably get snipe even if you made your own full-length table flush with the input.

With 12" boards, snipe was not very noticeable, whereas with 4" boards, it was always very noticeable.

Blade Lifespan
The blades that came with it do well, but it's only 2 blades. It goes through them fairly quickly. Newer wood is fine. I made several passes on both sides of rough hewn cedar. All was well. I sent through some 12" rough cedar with 25 year crusty paint, and it wasn't really happy with that.

It's 2mm per turn and on 12" stock with fresh blades you can do that. When you get to 1/3 turn and it still drops the RPMs significantly, you're past the life of the blades.

I got to this point after removing 3/16ths from each side of 40 feet of 4" wide cedar, and about 1/8th from each side of a 6' long 12" piece of paint encrusted cedar. It seems that the wider board heats the blades more, especially the old, rubbery paint, and once they heat up, the edge fades MUCH more rapidly.

Signs your planer blades are dull
The machine emits dust and not curls.
The machine leaves roller rubber on the workpiece.
The wood peels along the grain in very thin strip.
The motor slows down, but there is no output.
The rollers stop feeding.
The workpiece becomes polished, even glassy.
The workpiece is noticeably warm to the touch.
Running the workpiece through a second time at the same setting till slows the motor.

Blade Replacements
I'm thinking I'll see if I can design the same at http://www.emachineshop.com out of something harder under heat, but you know, since I don't REALLY have the skill for that, I picked up a couple sets of spare blades when I got the planer. The spares were $26/set and made of "High Speed Steel". I don't know the specific grade, but truly, they went south REALLY quickly on the wider, painted boards.

Blade Swap procedures
The swap is fairly easy, though they are initially installed with an impact wrench. Breaking the screws the first time gave off sparks on three. Freaky. Anyway, you access the six screws by:
A) Unplug the machine. Yes, UNPLUG IT. Switches have been known to fail in this universe. Don't risk it.
B) remove the two thumbscrews on the top.
C) Remove the dust chute
D) Turn the head with "the tool" such that you an access one side of the head. Adjust the machine height, or rotate the head such that the tool clears the handle/rollerbar.
E) Loosten the screws such that the black plate ALMOST comes loose. Test one screw for proper sizing. I think this is about a 16th of an inch.
F) Use the little split magnet tool to scoop under the blade, lift up off of the retaining pins, and pull out.
WARNING The blade may be hot if it's recently been used, especially if it's really dull.
G) spin the blade.
WARNING The sharp side of the blade is SHARP! I know this seems like an idiot thing to say, but if you aren't careful, I will mock you for your bloodletting experience. Yes, I'm secretly watching you.
H) Slid in, align such that it drops down properly (ie, the retaining pins are in the holes).
I) Tighten the screws, starting with the ends and working your way in. In generaly, thumb-tighten all of them, then torque them down afterward to make sure alignment is good.
J) Repeat for the other side of the head. (ie. always swap/replace BOTH blades at the same time).

Miscellaneous
Check your belt shroud, a burgundy curve of plastic on the top right of the machine. Mine had too much flashing in the channels and didn't seat properly. I didn't notice until it had been carved/sanded away severely.

The deck plate is polished steel. You can see the cutter head and rollers clearly in it. It's really cool, and might come in handy should something jam or clog. REMEMBER NOT TO TOUCH THE HEAD WITH YOUR FINGERS UNLESS YOU WANT TO BE CUT.

Yes, I used first and second person in a review.

Despite the warning that this is not a toy, etc., it's VERY fun, or at least satisfying, to see what a machine like this can do.

SUMMARY
This is cheap. Snipe will happen. Rollers, an assistant, or a full-sized and aligned table are greatly helpful. Blades dull quickly on older wood with old rubbery paint.

light weight portable planers with power. Easiest one I've ever had to change blades on (only takes about 10 minutes)nice feed rate and no chatter.