And I’ll toss in my agreement with both of the above gents.
Though I’ll note there are exceptions, for instance Phil Becker has used a 653 for mowing foam for many years and who knows how many thousand boards.
And myself, I like my 653 with HSS blade for hardwoods and softwoods, though I will admit that much of the hardwood I plane is still green, fresh from the sawmill and I do use a slightly slower feed rate than I would with, say, pine.
And, heh, if anybody has some 653 cutters in high speed steel that they have no use for, I have a home for 'em where they will be well loved and appreciated.
With heavier planers, pay serious attention to the height of your work piece, be it foam or wood. It increases the comfort and decreases the pain considerably. Had a similar situation with finish nailers ( pneumatic) - an old ( and damned heavy ) Senco I have gave me ^%$# tennis elbow over the course of one long house job, so this Yankee boy has a nice Hitachi finish nailer on his list for this year. And sundry benches and short ladders, to make life easier.
Now, let me repeat something I said earlier, mebbe expand on it.
You see, Richard, Surfdaddy and myself are doing work for pay here, and we have to produce. And power tools let us do that. In experienced hands they jack up production rates nicely, cutting material faster than hand tools. And if someone was going to be cranking out six balsa boards or more per week, by all means go nuts on power tools. Toss in a bandsaw or two, a jointer, table saw, thickness planer and maybe an overarm router for chambering.
But… if you are not going to be making more than one or two balsa boards per year, I might skip the power planer and the rest of the industrial grade kit. Speed isn’t an issue then, you’re not producing to a deadline. And it’s as much about the process as the product. So many guys want to have the same tools as ‘the pros use’ but they don’t and can’t put in the time with tools every day that the pros do and so can’t develop the feel for the tools the pros have from constant use and familiarity.So a professional power tool setup is the wrong setup to have.
Think about doing it with hand tools. Planes, drawknife, spoke shave, that sort of thing. You will have better control of the tool, several options of how to use it/them - maybe a spot the plane can’t quite do right but the spokeshave does just fine. Note that above I said that power tools are capable of upping the production ‘in experienced hands’ - in inexperienced hands they are weapons of medium-sized destruction. You can screw up an awful lot awfully fast.
In fact, we production guys still have pretty complete hand tool kits someplace handy. That’s where we got that experience that I referred to, with the hand tools when we were starting out, that lets us use power tools with some skill. Time spent with, say, an 18" corrugated sole hand plane gives you the feel for a power plane that lets you use it correctly.
I know I get a kind of guilty pleasure from using a hand tool on a job ( for pay) when maybe I could do it with a power tool. Besides there being some situations that the hand tool ( in my case, being a boat guy, an adze or broad hatchet) can do that a power tool can’t do in any reasonable amount of time. Maybe the minimum cut the power tool can do is too big and too uncontrollable for that last tiny slice it takes to get the fit right. But the properly sharpened hand tool can take off a shaving that will let light through.
Food for thought, anyways
doc…
