Craftsmanship in Wood

Afternoon gents!

I'm interested to pick up an electric hand planer for my occasional live edge jobs or otherwise big planks and slabs that I would not want to push over the jointer I will soon buy.

I'm interested in the line that Makita offers, primarily, since it seems very highly regarded. I wouldn't mind picking up the 3" wide one, or the 6". The middle one doesn't have a dust port.

Anyone hook one of these up to a festool vacuum?

I am also interested in the Festool HL850, but it seems pretty split in the reviews between people who like it and people who like it but think it is overpriced.

I would like something on the quieter side, so if the Festool is fairly quiet that would be a plus. Festool is usually good about making comparably quieter machines.

I wear ear covers of course but like to avoid alerting the neighborhood that I'm flattening a slab.

I also assume any and all of these can be used to flatten slabs?

Thank you all!

I have owned the older generation Makita (assuming we are talking about 3 1/4" planers here), and the Hitachi P20SB which had resharpen-able blades. I prefer the cheap Porter Cable PC60THP to both of them. I have been using the Porter Cable daily for about 2 years, blades are easy to change + easy to find at my local lumber yard. The Festool hose plugs right in. I am sure the Festool planer is nice, but would only entertain buying one if I need to use one of the special cutter heads.

Thanks Jack!

Hi Brian,

I tried a couple, not the Festool or bigger Makita, and settled on the Bosch 3272 (no longer made). I only use it for really coarse work like correcting wonky rough framing, and that model appealed to me for its ergonomics, small size, and light weight. It will hog off material very fast. It works well with a Festool vac as long as I run it along the grain- the long fibrous shavings clog up the port quickly when traversing.

I'm guessing a machine with larger registration surfaces would be better for flattening slabs, but you could use any power planer to knock off the really high spots before switching to hand planes. For the money, I think I'd only go with the Festool HL 850 if the rabbeting features or interchangeable cutters were important. And while we're talking money, it looks like the 3-1/4" models are so much cheaper than the larger ones, you'd have to use it quite a bit to justify the expense. Sorry I don't have any experience with current offerings.

I doubt you'll find anything approaching 'quiet' during use. Mine is not loud at all when running without load, but it screams like a shoebox planer when introduced to the wood.

-Matt

Thanks Matt,

I saw the DB rating at over 100db for the bigger Makita, I checked a few other tools in the shop and they're in the same range when I'm standing right near them, so I assume this one sounds similar to a router in terms of noise level and type of noise. For the occasional use, I think I can live with that. I don't work slabs daily, but anymore it seems I work them often enough that I'd like to power through the big work and fine tune with hand planes.

With slabs it seems that I'm always working with something that needs heavy stock removed and the most recent one is no exception.

I only want for the straight knives, but I would not mind having the ability to cut clean rabbets in bigger material.

Are you only considering handheld power planers for this task? I think there are better options - something like this:


You have a milling machine, and know how to use it. You can readily buy extrusions, aluminum billet and linear slides online...

Thanks for the suggestion Chris! I thought to use the router sled, but there is a place near me that surfaces slabs with a router sled pretty regularly and they seem to be moving away from it. There is another that uses CNC and also complains that when the slab releases tension it can make the job a bit of mess and quite long, which is why I assume the router sled guys are moving away from it. I do the work by hand currently so I'm comfortable working with winding sticks and straight edges and so I was thinking just speeding that process up a bit might be the ticket.

I don't work so many slabs to the point where I really want dedicated equipment for it, so I had thought the power planer seemed like a handy thing to have.

After speaking with a few people who use them, I'm pulling back a bit from the big Makita and thinking that the 3" one might be the most versatile. I'm back thinking about the Festool since it's the quietest of the bunch and seems to produce a good finish.

Am I backwards on my thinking?

Well, I think that using slabs at all is somewhat of a poor idea. Not the way to make lasting furniture that holds its form. No matter what method you use to remove material, tension will be released - - or one is simply exposing fresh wood to the atmosphere, and it then loses moisture and moves. Slabs are more likely to be imperfectly dried, compared to boards 1" thick or less. Your best bet would be to use a relatively docile wood, like walnut, but even then you can never count on the slab keeping flat - it's against the nature of the material in that configuration. And that slab would need to remain in an environment with a similar, and narrow, swing of moisture, as the place in which it was processed to final shape.

I learned my lesson with that on the recent cabinet build, having found that even 0.75" thick 'slabs' for shelves would not hold their flatness as the RH moved up and down. I am convinced that frame and panel is the only way to make pieces which keep their form over time.

I share your sentiment with respect to slabs, but still can't help but enjoy them in limited use, they were my first love with respect to furniture. I make efforts to work things in my favor, cutting battens into the slabs rather than applying them to the slab (breaking up the field of material) and working material to the thinner side of what is acceptable for slabs. I avoid anything super heavy or unusually wide for practical reasons in that I'm 150lbs on a good day so I'm not likely to be man-handling any 3" thick 4' wide slabs anytime soon.

Brian, I have the Festool ehl 65 (no longer sold in the U.S.). I find it is much quieter than both my Makita lunchbox planer and a Festool Router. Rarely use large slabs, but currently using the Festool to knock off high spots on one. I then use a 24" long hand plane with a 3" blade to flatten it. I don't think the short length of any electric planer will provide enough registration to avoid following dips in the surface of a plank, but you may have different results. The ehl 65 will also cut a clean rabbet very quickly that can then be quickly finished with a hand plane.