Craftsmanship in Wood

A couple of en-ban-ganna (円盤鉋) - kinda puts that home food processor to shame, eh?

A bit of sales lit. from another company that makes these rotary planes:

Ha ha ha. Just saw this post and fell off of the couch! This is one out of control tool. What ever would you use it for? John

I imagine it would be used much the same as a disc sander would be, and maybe more especially for trimming end grain. Basically it is a large motorized shooting board, if you look at it that way.

Here's a video of one getting going:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s0tHTOlkGA

That would put the fear of god into ya!

I found a few photos of one of these machines being used by a company making wooden knife handles, for kitchen knives. They have a rotary holder in front of the cutting disc which they use to trim the handles on their long grain surfaces:
Here's another one being used by a maker of wooden buckets, to trim the sides after glue up:
Another one used at a place making lots of finger-jointed wooden boxes:
These make a lot of sense if you want to plane hundreds of little boxes on the 4 side faces and the edged side:

Thanks for that. You never know whats gonna work till ya try it i guess. It's just every time i look at this unit my fingers sort of tingle. The lathe apparatus looks reasonable enough for the knife handle making and the wooden bucket holder looks generally alright, but the hand held wooden box operation could be a tad risky? The video you posted made me quite happy especially when the unit was turned off. All things considered it probably brought productivity to the workplace, good or bad. John