The knives on the planer's new cutter have been installed. Based on the test piece I ran through it, they should all be aligned and cutting correctly.
I guess if you hadn't heard before, we have a new cutterhead in our Dewalt thickness planer, a spiral carbide head from Sheartak! Funding and the installation of this were provided by Enbridge, a big thank you to Mauricio, Narz, and Nathan.
There are several advantages of this head, which uses forty tungsten carbide cutters arranged in four spirals, over the planer's stock 3-knife design. The most obvious is the quality of the cut, these are super sharp and are able to cleanly cut difficult or figured wood grain, leaving a surface you might not even want to sand before applying finish. More importantly for a space like ours, if a cutter is ever damaged by a nail or rock in a board, it has four cutting surfaces, and can simply be rotated 90 degrees and re-tightened, as opposed to replacing one or all of the knives. Once all four edges of the cutter are dull or damaged, it can be replaced with one of the ten spares we have. The cutters are currently all arranged with the marking dot on the upper right, and the cutters should only be rotated clockwise to keep track of their use.
There is one drawback from this style of cutterhead, as the spiral design means that the knives are constantly in contact with the wood, as opposed to rotating on and off like the old blade style. This results in a higher load on the motor, and could trip either the internal breaker or the one in the panel, when taking too heavy or wide of a cut, or in denser wood. Please err on the side of lighter cuts, and only use the planer on the "Finishing Cut" speed setting. Also, the planer still needs to be used with dust collection at all times, otherwise the onboard impeller will make a mess of the shop by blowing chips in every direction.
I have stored all the documents/info that came with the cutterhead on our computers, in the folder : C:UsersKMDocumentsPlans and ProceduresDewalt DW735 Spiral Cutterhead
The torque wrench, spare cutters, and other items will be stored in a drawer that will be built under the flip-top cart at some point.