Caught my DW735 planer eating boards on the infeed side...

I kept blaming the wood for snipe and tearout for like 6 months. Turned out the outfeed roller was just barely out of adjustment and it threw everything off... took me a whole Saturday to dial it back in. Has anyone else fought with a planer that was secretly sabotaging them?

3 comments

3 Comments

jessica_hall494d ago

Did you check the rollers with a straightedge or just eyeball it? I've been burned by trusting my eyes before on that kind of thing.

kim8194d ago

Oh I totally get where you're coming from with "burned by trusting my eyes" - been there more times than I care to count! But honestly, I've had way more trouble with straightedges on roller work than just eyeballing it. The rollers themselves are never perfectly true, and a straightedge just picks up on their own tiny imperfections that don't actually matter for alignment. I find that if you stand back and look at the whole setup from a few different angles, you can spot a misalignment way better than any tool can tell you. Plus I've had straightedges give me false readings because the roller surface has a bit of paint or dirt in one spot, and then I end up chasing a problem that was never really there.

thomas_martinez4d agoMost Upvoted

Have you ever tried running a string line across the rollers instead? That usually shows me any dips or high spots without fighting the tool's own flaws. What's your go-to method for checking that stuff?