Woodmaster and poplar molding

[Lucas G Hager]

As previously stated, I have been making m?olding with my Woodmaster 718 lately. I have an assortment of knives and such.

I am having trouble with poplar tearout. Let me run you through my setup.



I have the stock planed to 1/32 or 1/16 of my final thickness. I then set my profile and run to final depth in one pass. So far with just one knife in the planer head. I have purchased the 2 knife corr. head, but I haven't used it yet. I generally run around 12'/min. I do have played a little with the speed, but not to much. It's happened to more than one knife so that pretty much rules them out. I am very confident the knives are plenty shart. Will nearly shave hair. No chatter, just tearout. Should I maybe leave more stock on for the final pass? Slower? Faster?

I haven't had any problems with oak at all. In fact, it comes out beautifully.


I am open to any and all suggestions.



As with before, you may see this some other places

[Jeff Duncan]

First thing I'd try is leaving a little more meat, 1/32" is awful thin. I usually run moldings through the shaper and take a good 1/16"+ at the narrowest point. My heads all have 2 knives though and rotate at roughly 8k rpm. Feed rate depends of course, but 12' per minute is pretty slow if they're smaller moldings....<2". For bigger stuff I can see slowing it right down, and of course if your only running one knife that would affect the speed too.

Can't help any more than that, hopefully someone more familiar with your machine will come along with better advice.

good luck,
JeffD

[Peter Quinn]

I don't have much info about the woodmaster specifically, but the feed rate seems reasonable. Maybe a bit quick for a one knife set up versus my experience with a 2 knife Shop fox mini molder. The only thing that comes to mind with poplar is that some of it has come to me TOO dry, like they cooked it hard in the kiln. It seems to be brittle and a bit hard for tulip, and it shapes poorly. My solution is to use it for other things and source some fresh wood. Not sure this is your problem, but if all your wood comes from one source you may try another source or another pack from the same source. Its a long shot but worth eliminating as a possibility. If your wood comes from the borg, then all bets are off.

[David Kumm]

Poplar, in spite of being soft can be tricky. It gets fuzzy and furry. Are you sure that the problem is tearout and not poor chip collection allowing the cutter to drive the chips into the wood? Woodmasters have mediocre chip collection when used with a big collector. I would also ask the knife people if the knife is ground to cut softwood since it seems to work fine in Oak. Generally I have always felt the second knife was worth it, especially since you get charged less for it than the first one. Soft maple makes for better trim stock in my world. Dave

[Jim Andrew]

I've only used my woodmaster to make molding for my house, and used white oak. Worked great. I have the helical head, so use the 3 knife cutterhead for the molding head, less chatter.

[Steve Jenkins]

You say you plane your board to final thickness pluss about 1/16 then run the profile in one pass. Depending on the profile you may be taking off 1/4" or more at the deep areas of the molding. I would run the molding in several passes taking off 1/16 or so per pass.

[Lucas G Hager]

So with some experimentation, I believe I have solved my problems. First, grain direction means everything. The grain should be angled high on the infeed side, and low on the outfeed side when viewed on the side.
With poplar, I found hogging all but a 1/16 on the first pass and the remaining 1/16 on the second. The best results were running both passes at 12'/min. I tried several speeds and depths and that seemed to yield the best results.
I really think the grain direction made the most significant difference.

Thanks for the help.