Soooo, all the advice you’ve ever heard about not operating heavy machinery while fatigued is apparently true, much to my dismay. This sad tale of woe started out with a full day in the shop and ended with my A3-31 shattered and broken. After working all day, I figured I’d plane just one more board to finish a cutting board for my mother in-law. Yes, it was supposed to be for Christmas, and it’s really late but who’s counting...
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this scrap piece of walnut is tapered and because I was obviously not paying attention, I fed the tapered edge into the planer, not the edge I’d been planing down. Once the meat of the wood hit the in-feed roller, “BLAM” metal shrieking and the smell of smoke!!! Good grief I’ve killed it!
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Best I can tell, when the taper got too thick, the wood jammed into the cutter, the in-feed roller suddenly stoped and the torque from the motor striped the in-feed roller gear clean off. This caused a chain reaction, pun intended, back lashing the chain which doubled over and jammed into a bracket further down in the transmission drive. What a mess. Did I mention the smell of smoke.
Of course this all happened on a Friday evening so I had to stew in a cauldron of my own stupidity for an entire weekend while I waited for Felder to open on Monday morning... Long story, short, 5 callers to Felder Tech reps and 3 to a field repair Tech got the chain untangled, a bracket bent back into shape and the transmission and motor tested.
The diagnosis: on the plus side the motor seems fine and there’s no apparent damage to the other gears or jointer drive. The bad... the threaded stud that holds the in-feed roller drive gear is sheared off and rounded over. Just great... how much is this moment of stupidity going to cost me? Well the tech support guy adds up the parts I need, new in-feed roller, gear, lock nut, etc... about $200 plus shipping. Ok, that’s an expensive mistake and this is turning into an expensive cutting board but I can swing that and swap out the roller myself, right? Expensive but lesson learned and all, I tell myself... Not so fast turbo... very nice field tech guy proceeds to tell me he’s never had a customer successfully replace a roller and get the machine calibrated in his 15 years on the job...
“No problem”, I tell him, “I’m wicked handy and have already adjusted the jointer tables and all that... I should be fine right?” We’ll... not so much he says... Apparently, unless you’ve done this swap before and know what you’re doing it’s a nightmare. He was very emphatic that I’d ultimately be calling a tech out if I tried it myself. Ok fine, how much is it to send out a guy to swap it for me... “Hold on let me get you an estimate”... Now I live exactly 70 miles from the west coast Felder office, Anaheim and just to get the guy to my house and back... $400! And the time estimate to swap the part and recalibrate the cutter, the rollers, the table, the jointer beds... 6 hours at $125/ hr. WHAT!?! So at around $1500 bucks when it’s all said and done, this had better be the most amazing cutting board in the history of woodworking... Crap!
I told him I’d have to call him back after I finish smacking my forehead with a framing hammer...
I then ended up talking to a friend of a friend who’s in the UK and repairs a lot of Euro equipment including Felder / Hammer and he concurred, replacing the roller is a bear of a job. He recommended I look into having a pro welder come over and weld a new gear onto the in-feed roller. He said it would be a lot cheaper and if I had to someday replace the gear I could just cut it off and be no worse off than I am now... He went so far as to say, if this was his machine, that’s what he’d do, and Bob’s your Uncle. Hmmm, crazy Brits and the colorful colloquiums.
Well it’s official, I’m a moron, brought this on myself and I should just suck it up and get a welder out here for $300 bucks or so, (I’m guessing, as I haven’t called a welder yet) but pride of ownership is gnawing at my shattered ego and I really want my uber expensive jointer/planer combo to be whole again.
I don’t know what I’ll end up doing but I thought I’d share the moment of inattention that killed my favorite machine and if there’s anyone out there who happens to be friends with the “good idea fairy” and has an alternate idea on how to bring my machine back from the grave, please fell free to sing out as I’m a wee bit desperate right about now.
Thanks for reading all this and putting up with my feeble attempts to hide my failings behind a wall of humor.