Power planer bit me on the second pass, here's what happened

I was flattening a solid oak tabletop in my garage last Saturday and got careless with the depth setting. Set it to 1/16 instead of 1/32 and the thing grabbed, kicked back, and tore a strip off my left thumb. Blood everywhere, had to stop and wrap it with shop rags before driving to urgent care in Akron. That was a $85 copay plus a four hour wait, and the board is still junk because I have to resurface the whole thing now. Anyone else had a tool bite them when they rushed a setup, or am I the only one skipping the test pass on scrap?

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rowan_kelly644d ago

1/16 on oak is asking for it, but I don't buy that a test pass on scrap would've saved you here. Scrap pine cuts totally different than solid oak, so a test run tells you almost nothing about how the real board will grab. What actually bites people is grain direction and feed speed, not the depth number alone. Running 1/16 in shallow passes at a slow steady feed is how most guys flatten big slabs, and it works fine when the knives are sharp and you don't stop mid cut. Sounds more like the planer caught a climb cut on reversed grain than a setup shortcut.

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