Dewalt 735

[Justin Rapp]

Has anyone had this issue/experience with a Dewalt 735 planer: The planer is design to go to 1/8 inch, and even has a 1/8 inch stop. I was running some wood strips (hickory) through, about 2.25" wide and just over 1/8" (about 3/16 from resaw on the bandsaw). I was going very light, 1/64 or so per pass and testing in a spline for a picture frame after each pass. I got some chatter during a few passes and it started to shred the piece as it was coming out the back. Any thoughts on a way to resolve this. Blades seem fine as the picture frame parts I sent through early came out like glass and that was bubinga which is tough has hell.

[Brian Runau]

I plane veneer pieces to put on sides of legs when using quarter sawn oak. Same problem with the planer breaking thin pieces, got advice here to use a back up board that is jointed and planed flat, attach double sided tape a certain intervals and attach your thin piece and mill down to the desired thickness. I mill a board, joint/plane, and cut it on the band saw then put the good side down on the tape and mill the rough side. If you use a 3/4 board that has been jointed and planed, cut it down the middle you get two pieces you can mill down per 3/4" piece. You might be able to get more than two pieces(?), but this works for me. Takes a while to do, but I get usable pieces this way vs destroying a certain percentage of what I try to do without the backer board. Brian

[Lee Schierer]

I do what Brian does and it works well. I've made veneer thinner than 1/16". Just don't adhere the entire surface of the piece being planed with double sided tape. It will be very difficult to remove the thin piece.

[Brian Runau]

I do what Brian does and it works well. I've made veneer thinner than 1/16". Just don't adhere the entire surface of the piece being planed with double sided tape. It will be very difficult to remove the thin piece.


Like Lee says, not too much tape. I use maybe 3 or 4 pcs equal spaced across the board on a 40" piece. Then use putty knives with real gentle movement to remove the piece. I have to retape for each piece. If you use a wide board maybe you can do a 2 or 3 up set up. Brian

[John Kananis]

Try a piece of melamine as the substrate. Tape pulls off much easier.

Edit: just don't take too deep of a cut or it'll be messy.

[Brian Runau]

Try a piece of melamine as the substrate. Tape pulls off much easier.

Edit: just don't take too deep of a cut or it'll be messy.


John, great idea, where were you when I was doing mine! brian

[Jim Becker]

Even though you "can" go to .125" per the machine specification, things can get dicey at that thinness for the individual piece of wood you are working with. Some pieces of wood just like to chatter enough that, well..."stuff" happens. I'm kinda glad to have a drum sander back in the shop for this kind of thing, honestly.

[Zachary Hoyt]

I used to plane guitar sides and backs and dulcimer parts on 733, and my experience (mainly with cherry, but some other woods) was that if there was a lot of grain runout the planer would tear through the piece of wood, but if I could find pieces to resaw where the grain ran as nearly straight as possible it worked better more of the time. I too bought a drum sander about 4 or 5 years ago and it has been a huge help for this kind of work. I can sand a whole guitar back or soundboard, after gluing, and take it down very slowly to get just where I want to be, with no tearout or damage. If you only want thin wood occasionally it might not be worth the cost and shop space, but if you make those veneers at all often a drum sander will be a huge help.

[Steve Demuth]

First thing with planing anything that thin is to only do it on straight grain stock with minimal to zero runout. Vertical grain softwood or rift sawn hardwood. Anything else is going to be dicey.

Beyond that as others have said, using a sled with the stock adhered to the sled (as Jim Becker says, don't use too much tape) is a proven technique. I have planed quite a bit though, by hand feeding the stock with the infeed and outfeed tails both bent significantly upward. so there is significant tension in the wood pushing the stock down onto the platen, particularly during the initial and final segments where the stock is free on one end (not pinned by both feed rollers). Using this technique and rift sawn stock, my failure rate was less than one in 20 strips. But it's only good for relatively narrow pieces - anything over 4" wide, and it starts to get hard to keep the corners down.

All of this is why I own have a love-hate relationship with a drum sander. Properly tuned and used, it eliminates the problem, and will manage less than ideal wood. I've even done burl wood down to less than 1/16 on the sander, albeit stuck down on the edges to a melamine platen.

[Mel Fulks]

I would use a sharp knife to test material to see which direction is “right “. There is a difference between “ the way the grain is going” and
which way is right to lead. You can also judge right way by looking at the tiny short dashes in the grain. Not the growth ring stuff.

[Patrick Varley]

In addition to what everyone else has said, hickory isn't the easiest to machine in general and is fairly tearout-prone. Wouldn't be surprised if that's contributing.

[Myles Moran]

I used my 735 to plane hickory down to roughly 3/32 to do some bent laminations for a set of kitchen chairs. A few things i did to achieve this: fresh knives, I changed them specifically for these pieces. Picked the straightest grain I could for these pieces in the thickness direction. Sled with double stick tape like everyone has mentioned. Because of the fan on the 735, I really needed to stick the ends down to the sled. The middle just needed a little. I didn't turn on my dust collector. Normally I run it in addition to the 735's crazy fan. This time I just let the 735 do the work pushing the chips into my dust collector to minimize additional suction that could pull the hickory off the sled into the cutter head.

Despite all of this, I did have a few with less than perfect results. Just be prepared for them to fail and don't stand on the infeed side, and don't have anything you wouldn't want to get hit with kickback on the infeed side of the planer. I can't remember what my success rate was for getting them planed down, but i want to say that of the 64 pieces I needed to make, I ended up milling 12 extra. Since these backs were grain matched across the chair I made more extras to give me options when replacing a damaged one. I think only one or two failed spectacularly, the other ones I swapped just had some tearout.

[Justin Rapp]

Thanks for the ideas, I will give the backer board/tape a try. Might be a few days before I get a chance.

[Justin Rapp]

In addition to what everyone else has said, hickory isn't the easiest to machine in general and is fairly tearout-prone. Wouldn't be surprised if that's contributing.

I tried just running a piece of poplar through to do the same and got similar results.

[Justin Rapp]

Even though you "can" go to .125" per the machine specification, things can get dicey at that thinness for the individual piece of wood you are working with. Some pieces of wood just like to chatter enough that, well..."stuff" happens. I'm kinda glad to have a drum sander back in the shop for this kind of thing, honestly.

I been eyeing up a drum sander for years. I actually looked at one today while at Woodcraft but was really just looking. I probably passed right by your area on my way and could have paid for time to run a few pieces through. Oh well.

[Jim Becker]

I would have been happy to help you out, Justin. I was actually working in the temporary gara-shop today for a change!

I scarfed my current 19-38 drum sander used a couple years ago. "Used" is a misnomer, as it had very little actual use and was in an estate sale out near Harrisburg PA. It was definitely worth the drive! The funny thing is that I owned a Performax 22-44 years ago and never used it...so I sold it to another 'Creeker. Then new kinds of work entered my activities and, well...I had to spend the money again. Go figure...

[Justin Rapp]

I would have been happy to help you out, Justin. I was actually working in the temporary gara-shop today for a change!

I scarfed my current 19-38 drum sander used a couple years ago. "Used" is a misnomer, as it had very little actual use and was in an estate sale out near Harrisburg PA. It was definitely worth the drive! The funny thing is that I owned a Performax 22-44 years ago and never used it...so I sold it to another 'Creeker. Then new kinds of work entered my activities and, well...I had to spend the money again. Go figure...

Ironically I did think of another option which was to bring the piece of wood down to 1/8 using the belt sander configuration on my Ridgid oscillating belt / spindle sander. I really don't like this tool in belt mode as the oscillating motion actually makes using the belt a bit dangerous in my view. There is a stop block built in to prevent the wood from getting pulled left with the belt, however it doesn't stop the wood from getting pulled up. Well this is what happened and the wood pulled up and over the stop block, sending the wood flying and a my middle finger on my left hand hit the 80 grit belt and I lost some skin. This tool is now only going to be used a spindle sander.

There is Jet 16/32 for sale that looks mint, but it's down in Virginia. They are asking 1000 including the base. Is it worth a 620 mile round trip drive? Tough call really as new it's 1500. From a cost standpoint, I wouldn't be saving all that much after factoring in gas, tolls , maybe meals on the road, etc.

[Jim Becker]

I paid $900 for the mint 19-38 but IMHO, that was a "steal". It was also a few years ago before used machine prices jumped due to demand.

[Zachary Hoyt]

That was a good price. It was $1400 for a new 19-38 when I bought mine if I recall correctly, after watching for a used drum sander for a few years. Now a new one is close to $2k from what I see.

[Jim Becker]

Yea, I really felt tickled to get it at that price and it was nearly unused. I did add the digital readout to it since I work mostly in metric, but not exclusively. That lets me switch between them easily. The on-machine scale is either one or the other; not both scales. Mine came with the stand, too, although I'm not using that anymore...I guess I need to put that stand in the Classifieds if I don't decide to use it for something else in the new shop building.

[Zachary Hoyt]

Good for you. I just use a digital caliper that switches between fractions, decimal inches, and metric and check the wood after it comes out. I've found that I can run a piece of wood through 3 times at one setting and it will take off a little more each time, somehow. It's nice when trying to sneak up on a certain thickness for guitar parts. I sold my stand on Craigslist before I moved. I think I got $20 for it, but that was better than nothing.

[Jim Becker]

I have more than one digital caliper, Zachary...very necessary for my CNC work. I like the readout on the sander simply because it helps with setting up for the start of the cut as well as monitoring next pass settings. The actual final thickness is certainly zeroed in to using the caliper.

[Myles Moran]

I tried just running a piece of poplar through to do the same and got similar results.

Once I figured out everything i mentioned in my earlier post, i got good results with poplar (i had to build a trial chair first because i wasn't sure about how good of a chair i could build). Hickory wasn't horrible, but the softer poplar didn't want to catch like the hickory did.

[Lee Schierer]

Once I figured out everything i mentioned in my earlier post, i got good results with poplar (i had to build a trial chair first because i wasn't sure about how good of a chair i could build). Hickory wasn't horrible, but the softer poplar didn't want to catch like the hickory did.

Hickory is very prone to tear out. Any cutting edge hitting the ends of grain will tend to snag and that often leads to tear out. When I work with hickory, I run a piece of soft cloth like a used Tee shirt along the face. If I feel little snags, I run the board through the planer in the other direction. Even that doesn't always help if the grain in the piece is wavy when viewed from the side.