A few months ago I picked up a vintage Montgomery Ward Power-Kraft TPC-8937A power planer. The planer has a 3-1/16" cutterhead and a 7.0 amp motor. When I purchased the planer, it was in pretty rough shape.
Before
The power cord and strain relief for the planer were both severely rotted, in addition, it was obvious that the planer had seen a significant amount of moisture at some point, as all the bearings, blades and armature fan were covered in surface rust.
The planer is almost all aluminum, so the body wasn’t too bad, but it had a lot of surface corrosion and was covered in dirt.
The nameplate was pretty much a lost cause. I ended up not even putting the nameplate back on, but am currently looking for images of a similar name plate that I can have printed out for a replacement.
The base had a lot of deep scratches. I was able to shine it up on the wire wheel, but didn’t really want to do too much surface removal to true it up and remove the scratches.
Reassembly
After disassembling the planer, I let the parts soak in the parts washer over night, then took them to the wire wheel, masked them, then primed and painted them. There are 3 coats of automotive primer and 4 coats of silver metallic (Rustoleum 7271 equivalent), followed by a coat of clear coat on all of the aluminum pieces and the belt guard.
I cleaned the armature and ended up painting the armature fan because I couldn’t get it to polish to my liking after being so rusted.
I buffed the handle and shoe adjustment knob as good as I could to try to bring a bit of shine back to it as well.
While waiting for bearings to come in, I started the main assembly of the planer. I cleaned up the coil with a bit of citrus cleaner and a toothbrush and put it back in the planer.
Before paint, I took the base of the planer and cleaned it up on the wire wheel. I got it a bit shinier but didn’t remove most of the deeper scratches or really bring it to a mirror finish by any means.
I replaced the cord on the planer, replaced the trigger with an identical NOS locking switch I had laying around, replaced the brush caps with NOS brush caps I had laying around and then replaced all the bearings.
The replacement bearings were as follows
- SKF 608 2ZJEM
- 2x SKF 629 2ZJEM
- SKF 6200 2ZJEM
All bearings were high speed SKF bearings with metal bearing shields on both sides.
Finished
All finished and ready to send off to my friend for his birthday present.
The blades on the planer had some severe nicks in them, so I am currently waiting for my local saw shop to finish fabricating new ones for the planer.
The little black bolt on the base of the shoe is used for locking down the shoe. There isn’t really any give or play in the shoe from the adjustment knob and its kept pretty tight with the tensioning spring, so I barely tightened it.
When I bought the planer, the cord and strain relief were both rotted. The cord was extremely rotted, however, the strain relief still had some good rubber left on it below the surface rot. The strain relief has a metal threaded core which the rubber was originally molded around, so I had to get a bit creative in making a new one, since there was no similar strain relief I could find.
I took the spring cord relief off an old Skil 825 saw I parted out and screwed the larger end of the spring onto the rubber until it had about 4 or 5 rings of the spring wrapped onto the original rubber strain relief. After I got it on, I took a piece of 4/0 adhesive lined heavy wall heat shrink and covered the spring and semi rotted rubber strain relief.
Granted, it had a few more casting marks then I would have liked to have seen and I wasn’t the biggest fan of the rotary / screw type depth adjustment, but it seems to work well none the less, just not as preferable as the ‘on the fly’ depth adjustment on a Skil 100.
