Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Plane plan

Just a bit of messing about. I bought a thickness planer that feeds timber through automatically and also has a jointer on the side. The problem with these little machines is that they throw out a hell of a lot of shavings. Not so much the jointer, but the thickness planer makes mountains.
They are also a little bit low and play murder with the lower regions after a heavy session. I wanted to build a stand to raise the height of the machine a bit and then I inherited a blower from a chap down the road who had some kind of clothes making business at one point. That coincidence made me want to house the blower and a drawer to hold shavings under the machine in the stand. It took me a while to build up the momentum to build it, but these days I reap the reward. I made the mistake of having the outflow of air and the intake for shavings on opposite sides of the box at first because I thought that would work best. I had to cover up that hole (A in the drawing) and now it just serves as a little window to check on shaving build up. Actually the out take for air needs to be right around the intake, the shavings come storming in looking for the way out but it is hiding behind the door they came in through so they don't find it easily and eventually run out of energy to sit in the drawer and await their fate. Utterly confusing trying to draw the gubbins even now that it is made. The Photo below shows pieces of timber in the machine with their direction of motion and the flow of air. Also a close up of the mesh in the drawer to stop the shavings, etc.
I am on to planing timber for the next project, a small book case. Hence this little entry.