Re: o.t. wood planer question


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Posted by David Sherman on Monday, April 23, 2007 at 23:40:33 :

In Reply to: Re: o.t. wood planer question posted by Tom in Chicago on Monday, April 23, 2007 at 23:26:00 :

Power "requirements" have climbed unnecessarily in my opinion these days. People will say "you need XX" for a saw, a planer, a lathe, or whatever. The reality is that once you overcome friction and windage, power requirements scale directly as the speed at which you're cutting. With home workshop projects, or any one-off work, the setup takes far longer than the actual machining. The sawmill that wants to spit out 100,000 ft of framing lumber in a day cares about speed and will throw all the power they can get at it. But to the guy that wants to make a nice table out of the maple tree that fell over in the windstorm, does it really matter if the planer feeds at 20 ft/min rather than 10 ft/min? So long as you slow down the feed and the cutter RPM by the same amount, within reason, the finish will stay the same, but maybe that means you can use a 3 horse motor instead of a 5 horse one, which is the difference between an easy 240 volt home installation, and some serious industrial wiring. To cut, you need to maintain the same torque on the cutter, whatever it may be, as you reduce the hp, which means the pulleys probably need to be changed, but that's usually not too hard.

In the days of flat belts and line shafting, wood and metal working machines ran at speeds and power levels that would seem sort of weak today, but they got the job done. They just didn't do it quite as fast.



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