How to sharpen electric planer knives

An electric planer serves as an indispensable tool in the construction and repair of a house, as in any power tool, there are consumables in its device. At the electric planer, knives are consumables, with the help of which the tree is processed. As a rule, knives are double-sided, in a set of 2 pieces. Remember: if the planer does not remove chips well, and your knives are dull, then it's time to change them. But in this case, it is worth mentioning that some of them are simply subject to sharpening. To do this, you need to know how to set the knives of the electric planer after sharpening, and how to carry out the knife sharpening procedure itself.

Planer knives

Knives are mounted on a rotating drum of an electric planer and are designed to remove the top layer of material during the planing of wooden products. If this tooling has 1 cutting edge or 2. The last blades are called rotary because their position is easily changed if one side becomes dull. Planer knives are made from tool steel or tungsten carbide. The first of them can be sharpened repeatedly.

Blades in shape are: straight - used for sampling quarters and planing narrow parts; rounded - intended for processing wide areas, because they make transitions between planing lines more accurate; wavy - figured knives for an electric planer are suitable for simulating "aged" surfaces.

Before using the electric planer, it is recommended to check every time that the knives are installed correctly. Their cutting edge should barely protrude outward and be parallel to the sole of the planer. To determine how the knife is adjusted, raise the tool to eye level with the sole up.

Above the sole, on average, the cutting edge of the knife should protrude by 0.5 millimeters. At the sherhebel, which is intended for the initial rough planing, the cutting edge must be released by at least 1 millimeter. It is very easy to adjust the position of the knife. Turn the small and large adjusting screws behind the planer knife platform left and right in sequence until the cutting edge is in the desired position.

After that, install the knife in the electric planer and fix the position with the centering lever and the screw on the top plate. With a new electric planer, as a rule, the position of the knife is already adjusted. However, after prolonged use, the setting will be lost. Therefore, if you are using a planer after a long break, you need to first check if everything is so. Do not immediately start working on details with a newly adjusted electric planer without trying it on an unnecessary board.

Classification of knives for electric planer

Also, electric planer knives are divided by size. If you have an imported plane, for example, from Black & Dekker or Skil, then there are traditional 82 mm knives, they are popularly called “plates”. From inexpensive and high-quality, you can recommend knives from the manufacturer "Bison" made of carbon steel. These knives are suitable for most foreign planers, even for Bosch and Makita professional electric tools.

Exact overall dimensions: length 82 mm, width 5.5 mm and thickness 1.2 mm. On sale you can find knives from various manufacturers and the price in this case depends on the company in the first place. If you buy Bosch ones, then the cost will be 2 times higher than that of ordinary household ones - Bison, Stayer, Fit, Matrix. Of course, the difference in quality will be quite noticeable.

There are knives that are specially designed for some models of electric planers. For the popular planes Interskol and Baikal, special knives are intended, they are wider than the "plates" and thicker. They are stronger, and when you hit a knot or nail while working with an electric planer, the knife will not break, and the notch can be easily removed on the sandpaper.

The width of these knives is always approximately 1 centimeter, they differ significantly from others. These knives for electric planers come in different lengths: 82 and 102 mm, for different models of Baikal and Interskol. If these knives become dull, you can always sharpen them yourself. Unlike thin ones, they can be sharpened on emery with sufficient sharpening skills and the ability to withstand a plane.

Well, the third type of knives for electric planes is wide and thick, with holes for mounting. They are very specific and are only suitable for certain models, for example, for Rebir's planers, which have a power of 2000 watts. These knives are very thick and powerful, the width reaches 110 millimeters.

Changing electric planer knives

The highest demands are placed on electric planer knives. The fact that they are blunt can be easily determined by eye. To do this, look at the chamfer of the piece of iron and turn it around the cutting edge. The cutting edge is blunted if a shiny, thread-like strip appears at the end of the bevel at a certain position. The angle of sharpening the knife of the electric planer should be close to 30 degrees.

Today there are knives for electric planers using a rotary cutter. If one of these knife blades becomes dull, then it is customary to turn the knife over for the first time, and next time to replace it with a new sharp knife.

Knives for an electric planer are installed in a knife holder, which is placed in a conical transverse groove and clamped with three nuts. The height of the knives is regulated by two screws located at the edges. To remove the knife from the knife holder, loosen the nuts, tighten the screws to the end of the screws, which will help to push the knife holder out of the groove.

After that, it is necessary to select a drift that fits the thickness of the knife, and using it, knock out the knife from the knife holder in the transverse direction. Next, turn the knife over or take a new one if the old one is unusable, and carefully drive it into place, placing it on the side. Make sure that the knife enters the knife holder exactly parallel to it.

Having put new knives on the electric planer, you should set them in height with screws and tighten them with nuts. In this case, it is recommended to set the same clearance for both knives, otherwise the shaft will be unbalanced.

Editing on the donkey

When planing, a good quality of the treated surface can be achieved only when a sharp knife is used in the planer. If the cutting edge is a little dull and has no notches, then it will turn out to be sharpened by editing. Dull or serrated knives are recommended to be ground on a grinding wheel.

When grinding a knife on a grinding wheel, it is freely placed on a flat support surface or clamped into a sled. When grinding, the piece of iron must be moved along the grinding disk from side to side. Due to friction, the parts are heated. Therefore, it is necessary to apply moderate pressure when processing the product so that the cutting edge does not lose its hardness and does not turn blue.

The knife of the electric planer must be straightened after grinding. Only through this manipulation will he get the desired sharpness. To manually adjust the knives of an electric planer, artificial or natural bars are used, which are called donkeys. In a machine way, a piece of iron can be straightened on a finishing disk.

On Belgian whetstones, dressing can only be done with the addition of water. On bars from Arkansas, for straightening, on the contrary, a mixture of oil and kerosene is used. Artificial donkeys come with different levels of grinding. Many have coarse and fine grained sides.
The coarse side is for pre-dressing and the fine side is for fine dressing. To straighten knives on artificial whetstones, you can use a mixture of oils or water. In no case should you edit on a dry bar, because the blade will lose its hardening (let go) and will become dull. The bar needs to be washed from time to time so that the touchstone does not get salted.

When straightening, the chamfer is well rested against the bar and driven until it crosses, until it becomes as shiny as a mirror, and all burrs disappear. The front side of the piece of iron is only driven down and up along the touchstone, and the procedure for editing it takes less time.
The lapping disc is made of an artificial material containing a finely dispersed abrasive agent. With the help of such discs, you can edit the knives for electric planers in machine mode.

Sharpening electric planer knives

Before the procedure for replacing the knives of the electric planer, you must first determine the need for it. It’s easy to find out: if the electric plane passes through the workpiece worse than before, then you need to start resharpening its knives. In addition, remember that blunt knives can increase the risk of kickback when hitting hard parts of the wood, such as knots.

The first step in sharpening an electric plane knife is to place an abrasive stone in water for a few minutes. The stone should absorb as much moisture as possible. This helps to avoid excessive dust formation and improves the quality of sharpening the electric planer. When sharpening knives, it is important to ensure that they touch the abrasive stone and at the same angle all the time.

The second stage is fixing the knives in a special block. To sharpen a knife for an electric planer with high quality, it is customary to use a special device, which will help to avoid violations of the geometry or balancing of the knives. Loosen the two nuts that secure the shoe clamp plate and insert the knives all the way into the electric plane knife sharpener. Then tighten the fixing nuts again. Make sure that the cutting edges of the knives are in the same plane.

The third step is the sharpening process itself. Sharpening knives for an electric planer must be done using a special technology. The steel on resharpenable knives is of such high quality that it allows you to sharpen your knives well and make them razor sharp. However, make sure that the balance of the knives is not disturbed. Since two knives are used in the electric planer, the issue of balancing is strict.

The straightness of the blade during sharpening is checked using any straight surface. The width of the bevel should be exactly the same along the entire length of the blade. Knives are usually sharpened on a hand sharpener. It is recommended to sharpen for so long until the finest burrs appear on the blade, which are difficult to distinguish by eye. Make sure that the bevel is even, without concavities and bulges. Burrs must be removed. To do this, when sharpening the knives of an electric planer, the knife is placed with the reverse side flat on the bar and carried out several times over it.

Assembly of electric planer knives

After sharpening the knife, first connect it to the overlay. It should protrude 3 millimeters beyond the edge of the lining. Completely assemble the tool, adjust the correct position of the knife so that its edge protrudes beyond the edge of the platform, as expected, by 0.5 mm. Connect the knife and the overlay with one screw. Loosen the screw, turn the knife 90 degrees and separate the parts.

First, attach the knife to the bar with a bevel and move it in this position back and forth at an acute angle of 30 degrees. When burrs appear on the cutting edge, turn the knife over, place it flat on a block and move back and forth to remove the burrs. The edge of the knife should protrude 3 millimeters beyond the edge of the lining. The screw that fastens the blade and the knife must be tightened well so that even after prolonged use, both parts fit snugly against each other.

After you have sharpened the knives of the electric planer, you should immediately try out the blade by removing a few shavings. It has been proven in practice that the blade of a tool that is put into operation immediately after sharpening dulls less. To avoid frequent sharpening of knives on the grinder, carefully monitor the state of the piece of iron during work, and when the first signs of dullness (shiny stripes) appear, immediately correct the electric planer on the whetstone.

Now you know why it is so important to constantly monitor the position of the knives on the electric planer, adjust them in time, remove and install new pieces of iron. In addition, you always have the opportunity to sharpen the knives of the electric planer on a special device and put them back on.