Benchtop thickness planer dust collection

[Erwin Graween]

Hi,

I'm working wood more the neanderthal way as of today. So I'm currently buying wood already planed and thicknessed or I prepare it with handplanes, which is a lot of work.

I'm thinking about throwing in a benchtop thickness planer. For the moment I do not have the budget and space for a jointer or combo machine, which also needs a chip collector itself needing some space and budget.
This way I'll only have to joint by hand (even roughly), and let the machine do the thicknessing, with eventually flipping the board.

So my question is, can I hook the planer to a regular good quality dust collector with a cyclone separator between ? Given a 50 mm hose ?

Will it work to collect the chips ? Or do I definetly need a bigger chip collector to handle this ?

Thank you for your feedbacks an return of experience.

Regards.

[Derek Cohen]

Hi Erwin

The answer is "it depends".

If you have a thicknesser/planer with straight knives, then you will need a 1-2 hp dust collector. I used to have a 12" Delta, and connected it to a Fein vacuum cleaner via a 50mm hose. It sort of worked, but the fine shavings would build up inside the machine and spill out the back.

I suspect that this may work if you have a thicknesser with spiral blades. This creates larger chips, and it seems easier to pick them up. In my opinion, you would be better off with a 1-2 hp DC as a minimum, and even then you are doing little more than sweeping the room, and not cleaning the air.

As an alternative to this method, you can do a good job of thicknessing boards with a bandsaw and #5 jack (with a 10" cambered blade) and a #7 jointer plane: flatten the board, then resaw a smidgeon larger, and take it to dimension with the #7. I did this for years.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[Dick Mahany]

I currently have a DW734 bench top planer connected to the largest Ridgid shop vac through an Oneida dust deputy with a 2-1/2" hose. Chip collection is marginal and better on the left side nearest the chip deflector port. My previous planer used a 4" port hooked up to a cyclone and was much better than my current set up.

I understand that the DW735 has an internal exhaust boost fan for chip extraction that is much more effective.

[Steve Demuth]

Depends on the machine. The Dewalt 735 has a chip impeller built into the planer, and works great with a small cyclone separator with no more than a shop vac powering it. Some other benchtops I've used, without the built-in impeller, struggle with the chip load. A short, straight run from the dust port to the cyclone helps with those machines.

The 735 is, by the way, an excellent machine for the use your planning. Properly adjusted with the extension table, you can get snipe-free, very good results. I used mine just as you suggest for many projects before I got a good jointer, and I still joint wide boards with the handplane / planer combination. I do recommend you build a planer sled though if you're going to do long stock. I find it much easier and faster once you've got the setup to shim a long, wide board on the planer sled and joint it that way, than to get a truly flat face first with handplanes. Your mileage may vary, of course.