Official Luthiers Forum!

I was thinking about getting one.
I plan to use it for thicknessing peghead veneers, roughing out a carve top electric,
and was wondering if I could thickness wood bindings.
No info on forum archives, but I did find some videos on how to use it.
Looks good, but I'm a little wary of it.
Do you like it?
How is it on figured wood?

It's a very handy tool for some things, but I wouldn't use it for materials as thin as hs veneers, though it may work. It would be ok for thinning bindings, but only if they weren't ripped yet. If they are ripped, I think there would be problems. Drum sander is much better for these tasks.

Does work well for taking the back of a neck and headstock down to thickness. Also good for thicknessing tops, backs and sides, but you need to take small bites so it's slow work. The blades must be kept sharp, especially on soft or curly woods.

Pat

_________________
formerly known around here as burbank
_________________

http://www.patfosterguitars.com

Also great for tapering neck and headstock thickness. Check Frank Ford's frets.com site for an old review and some tips.

Robbie has a great tube video on Youtube on using the Safe-T-Planer for thicknessing. Very usefull tool.

_________________
Jim Howell
Charlotte, NC

I posted this in the other thread, but this one seems to have the activity.

I don't know about stock as small as binding strips. That could be troublesome. I have one for my drilll press and one for my radial arm saw. I don't use either very often, as chip control is impossible, or certainly elusive. Stuff goes everywhere. It's big stuff so it's not dangerous, but it makes a mess. It would be nice to have a Safe T Planer booth.

_________________
Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

I use it often, to remove excess stock on back and side woods to get it within sander range, but mostly I use it for roughing out neck blanks for which it is indispensable compared to doing that on the edge sander. I wouldn't use it for bindings either, I use the drum of my edge sander for that.

I have seen a setup to do bindings with it. The guy had routed a channel in piece of wood for the binding to slide in and some hold downs made with clothes pins. He waxed the set up so the material would slide easily. He claimed it to be very effective. The main thing I have found with mine is it is important to have the leading edge about .5 degree narrower than the trailing edge of the cut. For me it was just a matter of giving my drill press table a good pop with my fist before making it tight. There is enough play in mine to give this slight angle. You could always shim your setup board on the leading edge with some paper to get the same effect.

_________________
http://goatrockukulele.com

Thanks folks.
Michael, that's what I was thinking of doing.
I'll get one and see how it behaves.
I was thinking it might be another dumb design, like the "wobble" dado blade.
I've heard horror stories about those.
Hey Michael, did you ever go to "The Ace In The Hole" when it was around?
I used to play there sometimes.
I wonder if I know you.
Ha!

Interesing...

I find I get the best results when the table is dead up perpendicular to the quill, so the tool is exactly the same height off the table all around. I put an auxilliary table on my DP that I could shim up, and I check it often, particularly when doing stuff to tight tolerances.

I do make binding strips with mine, as well as veneer down to .5mm. For bindings and other narrow stuff I use a simple fence: a dovetail slot in a piece of counter top, and a fence made out of pine. Set the tool height off the table with a setup piece. Have then fence slot under the tool, so that it only just catches the full width of the work. Turn the DP on, and slowly slide the fence in under the tool so that it's trimmed down to the exact height, and fix the fence in place (in my case, the dovetail slot has a small kink in it, so I just slide it in uintil it binds). Then run the work through. The fence right at the cutting edge, and the fact that the cutter is not going 'across' the work at too much of an angle, nearly eliminates chipout, and stuff doesn't fly around the shop. You do need to make new fences from time to time.

The Safe-T-Planers I've seen recently seem to be 'kits', in the sense that most hand planes are these days *sigh*. You generally need to lap the faces of the cutters flat on something like a diamond stone, and probably will need to also scrape the bottoms of the pockets in the casting flat. Warped cutters on non-flat bearing surfaces tend to move, and then things can get exciting.

I have one that I've never used (still brand new in the box) that I could sell ya cheap. PM me if you're interested.

Dave F.

_________________
Cambrian Guitars

"There goes Mister Tic-Tac out the back with some bric-brac from the knick-knack rack"

Dave if Allen doesn't want it I would.

Joe

Hey Joe,
go for it.
Woodcraft has one that I can buy.
Thanks you guys.
Looking at that thing makes me wonder how it does what it does.
Any advice on speed?
I'm thinking the highest speed possible for the most excitement.

High speed is critical to good results with it.

_________________
Waddy

Photobucket Build Album Library

Sound Clips of most of my guitars

alan stassforth asked:
"Looking at that thing makes me wonder how it does what it does."

It has three little cutters, made from round pieces of tool steel about 1/4" thick that have notches in them to form a hooked edge on one side. The cutters fit into pockets around the edge of the body of the tool,with the hooked edges outward. The pockets are slightly angled, so that the ends of the hooks are a little below the rest of the tool, and there are punched marks on the body showing you where the edges need to be so that they're all the same distance out from the center. When the cutters are properly sharpened and set up all three edges cut the same, so the tool has very little tendancy to grab the work and throw it, and only the very tips of the cutters drag on the surface, which minimizes friction and heating.

As with all such tools, routers and the like, the heat caused by cutting is carried away in the chips. Thus, in order to keep the tool cool you need to be making chips. If you pause for a little while in passing the stoock under the cutter it will heat up, making scorch marks on the wood. The heat also tends to dull the tool, and cause resin buildup on the cutters, which increases the drag and the heat produced, which causes more burning and dulling, which.... Keep the cutters sharp, watch your table setup, and keep the stock moving.

They come with a small white grinding wheel with a rounded edge, and arbor, which you chuck into the drill press to sharpen the cutters. You can hold the cutters by hand to sharpen them if you're not removing too much stock. Don't ever let them get so dull that you have to remove that much stock. You know the cutters are dull when the flat under surface at the outer end of the hook is rounded a little. That rounded area is dragging, causing the tool to overheat: see previous paragraph.

I find I get the best results when I'm really fussy about getting the cutters properly aligned with the punch marks, all nice and sharp, and the table flat and perpendicular to the quill. YMMV

It's called a 'Safe-T-Planer' because of the little lip of metal on the body of the tool that sticks out about 1/4" beyond the edges. It makes it a little harder to get your finger tips into the cutters, but it's not impossible. I've done it, a long time ago, and I can tell you it hurts. I saw one person get bitten while demonstrating how hard it was to get bitten. The key here is to _always_ have your fingers pointing away from the body of the tool, and _never_ pointing toward it. You can actually have the heel of your hand on the body of the tool while it's running, with your fingers splayed out all around, and not be in any danger. The risk is smallest when you're using it on thin stock; there's not much room underneath to get your fingers in. I always think twice about where my hands are when I'm doing something like leveling off one side of an end block to make it parallel to the other. Then you can have your whole hand under the cutters, and that's risky. It's one of the things I don't like to let the students do.

When thicknessing stock I don't like to take off more than 1/3 of the remaining thickness in a pass. If I have a set of sides that came in 4mm thick, and I want 2mm, I do it in two passes.

Just some random observations after nearly fortyyears of using one.

I have had one for about a year now. At first, I tried to use it without a fence & wrecked some scrap wood pretty effectively. The workpiece kept trying to skate away from me, it was hard to get a consistent depth of cut... All kinds of annoyances. I put the thing in its box & didn't touch it again until quite recently.
This week, I made a simple fence (with slots to bolt down it to the DP table & afford some adjustment). What a difference!
Practise with some scrap wood 'till you get comfortable with its idiosyncrasies.
I'm thinking some kind of fixture (rollers?) to hold the stock down would be a good idea.
I have yet to wrap my head around how to build one that wouldn't get in the way.
I find it particularly useful for hogging off material from oily wood before running it through the thickness sander.
It's great for putting the taper in the back of a neck blank too. Place a shim under the nut area set the height for the thickness you want at the 10th fret (or so, depending on your heel design) & go for it!
Leave a generous safety factor, at least until you get used to the tool. Stops would be useful in some cases too... the thing tends to run away when making a wide pass.
BTW... The less vertical slop you have in your quill shaft, the better.
I've decided I really like this little rig & wouldn't like to be without it again.

Daniel, Stew mac shows a simple hold down on their site. http://www.stewmac.com/freeinfo/Neck_re ... -0485.html

Great info, thanks again all.
I was going to buy one today on the way to visit my ma in the hospital,
but my brain is so spaced out right now because of her condition(s), that I forgot my wallet.
Tomorrow's another day.

Thanks for the link Darrel. That's WAY simpler than anything I'd come up with!

for your bindings why not make a binding/purfling sizer?

an old plane iron mounted on something adjustable, a 1'' dowel or even a bearing as a rest or foot, mount the thing in a vise- adjust, and draw the binding/purfling through it to shave to spec.

a safe-t-plane on binding will turn it into chittlin's pretty quick