Dc 380 Blade Height

[Jimmy Tallent]

Any body have any idea how far the blades are set above the cutter wheel,on a delta DC 380 planer.The book doesn't say,and the guage wont stay put in order to be accurate. HELP!!!!!!!!!!:confused:

[Larry Norton]

Jimmy, when I had my old Delta 540, I bought a set of Woodstock Planer Pals.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000DD1VL/sr=1-1/qid=1129567552/ref=sr_1_1/103-0996127-1119003?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance


It made an INCREDIBLE difference in setting the knives.

[Dev Emch]

Hey you got two posts on this one. I posted a height response on the other post so you admins need to coalese these entries into one post.:cool:

Word of caution with planer pals. These assume you have a knife in the correct position from the get go. You install the planer pal and then set the knife magnet to establish your cutting circle height. SHould you have already removed the knives or have some freak damage or setting to the knives, the planer pals become much more difficult to use.

I know this because I have a set of these, among a toy box of other commercial and homemade jigs, for setting knives. When I called up the planer pal folks to get help, they told me I was out of luck and that there was nothing they could do to help me. I need to contact the service department of the machine to get this information.

So keep this in mind when you pull knives from a jointer or planer using planer pals. By the way, I use planer pals on jointers as well. At least some jointers. Jointers with four incline suspension such as the oliver #166 and #12 should have the knives set relative to the cylinder and not the outfeed table. The outfeed table then needs to be set relavtive to the knife height and then the plane of both tables needs to be set relative to the outfeed table. This is done by adjusting the cut height and forward infeed inclines to establish a lip to lip level between the outfeed and infeed tables. Then use the aft infeed inclines to set the plane for both tables. There are more than one way to do this and this is one way that works for me.