NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1983, No. 43, $3.50 Making ... - Wood Tools

· ,
Four lmpowered bed rollers support boards fed through the Makita
2030. Whilejou walk around the machine, stock can be
temporarily shelve on two return rollers on top of the planer.
speeds to develop their rated power. As a result, they are
dangerously noisy (ear protection is a must) and, lacking
torque, they bog down under load. The Makita's 2-HP motor
is fine for most jointing and for planing narrow stock. It
chokes when you try to plane more than Ya2 in. off a wide
board in a single pass. Set aside some time if you're going to
mill a stack of lumber. And figure on cleaning up a mess-the
planer tosses the chips OntO the emerging board, the jointer
leaves them on the floor. I liked the Makita's four adjustable
bed rollers, especially the rwo outboard rollers which prop up
long boards, preventing them from being sniped-gouged too
deeply-as they emerge from the machine. Two return rollers
atop the machine offer a handy perch on which to rest the
board while you walk to the infeed end for another pass.
As a thicknesser, the Makita has great gauges. A plungertype
feeler gauge above the planer infeed table will tell you
how much you're planing off a board before you feed it, and
a nearby placard tells how much of a cut you can take for a
given width without bogging the motor. The thickness indicator,
also a plunger, is calibrated in eighths, reads easily, and
can be set as a stop for repeated cuts to the same thickness.
The jointer gauge (like all the others) is rudimentary at best.
After struggling with the short jointer tables on the overunder
machines, I found it surprisingly easy to accurately
edge-joint a long board on the Makita's 59-in. tables. The
tradeoff, of course, is a 6Ys-in. currerhead that's not very useful
for facing wide, warped stock prior to planing. Supported
at rwo points, the fence is rigid (although mine was warped),
it's movable and it tilts. It has one glaring problem, though.
If it's moved forward, the currerhead is exposed on the back
side. None of the other machines tested has this hazard.
Setting knives in the Makita is touchy. Instead of fitting
46
When the Makita fence is advanced over the cutter head,
knives are left dangerously exposed as stock is fed.
into slots, the knives are sprung against a squarish cutterhead
by steel clips and held fast by bolted-on, half-round covers.
To adjust the knives, you stick a screwdriver through slots in
the blade covers and pry up on the bottom edge of the knife.
Two small wooden blocks, which span the jointer mouth or
rest on machined surfaces above the planer currerhead, push
the knives to the correct level. Compared to the Inca, this is a
crude arrangement, and it takes lots of trial and error to get
right. The Makita does have one saving grace: the cutterhead
has an external wheel, so you can rotate it by hand, with a
pin to lock it at top dead center.
The Hitachi F-lOOOA, at 320 lb., is the heaviest machine I
tested, and its four steel support columns make it sturdier
than the Makita. Its planer and jointer capacity and running
gear are similar to the Makita's, but the Hitachi lacks the
outboard bed rollers, an annoying shortcoming which I
remedied by mounting my own outfeed roller on a plywood
outrigger. Rollers and castors can be bought from S.H.D.,
PO Box 13P, Sycamore Ave., Medford, Mass. 02 155.
Though Hitachi claims 3 HP for the howling little motor
that powers this machine, I couldn't detect any advantage
over the Makita's claimed 2 HP. As planers, they perform
equally, though the Hitachi is better at chip-handling. Planer
chips are ducted through an oblong chute that exhausts out
the side of the machine. Chips from the jointer are similarly
ducted downward. I fashioned wooden plugs to fit into these
ports, then drilled the plugs to accept the hose from my shop
vacuum. I can run the machine all day without making a
mess, though I have to empty the vacuum frequently.
Hitachi's knife-setting method is quite elegant and nearly
as accurate as Inca's. Like the Makita, the knives are fastened
to a squarish currerhead by bolted-on plates. A detent pin on
the hand wheel locks the currerhead at top dead center. The
knives are spring-loaded, so you just pop them in place and
push them down to height with a couple of magnetic clamps.
They stay put while you tighten the locking bolts.
The Hitachi's cast-iron jointer fence is the best of all the
machines I tested. It's heavy and easy to adjust, and it stays
where you put it. I felt safer using the F- lOOOA, as well. It's
festooned with bright yellow warning stickers, and has little