Thread: Spiral Cutterhead Review (long)

I recently took delivery of a Bridgewood 15" planer with a Byrd Spiral "SHELIX" cutterhead installed. It cost me an extra $800 US for the 15" stock planer cutterhead. I had originally thought of having one installed on my new jointer, but chose to put it on the planer on the sound advise of a very good friend. I thought I'd give a quick review because I know a lot of people think about buying one but the cost is relatively prohibitive. The Byrd cutterhead is simmilar to other spiral indexable carbide cutterheads, but the inserts are rotated 10 degrees to produce a true shear cut. you can read more here: http://www.byrdtool.com/journals.html

This is what it looks like from the DC outlet.


and out of the planer:


After bieng satisfied with the results on some Birdseye Hard Maple...



I felt confidant to try out the cutterhead on some Hawaian Koa with knots, reversing grain, and some serious figure. This stuff is $20 US per board foot and before buying the planer I was facing the task of face jointing and planing both boards by hand because my old dewalt planer would undoubtedly have disasterous effects. This is how the wood came from the sawyer. Notice the horrendous snipe from the sawyers planer on the far end of the rear board:




I jointed both boards on my new 12" jointer with a 4 knife cutterhead taking repeated, very light passes. This removed most of the tearout , but some remained:



I then began planing it using the Byrd head. the effect was pretty striking:



You can see the difference in the freshly jointed and planed surfaces in the next photo. I alligned the most difficult grain on both boards so the difference would be as apparent as possible. the jointed 4 knife cutterhead surface is at rear and the planed byrd cutterhead is at front:



Ironically I found that on straight grained hardwoods the byrd head actually produces a slightly rougher surface (to touch) compared to a straight knife cutterhead. This was only noticable by feel, not by sight, and not due to tearout. It's also immaterial because regardless of the cutterhead used, the stock still needs to be finish hand planed/scraped/sanded.

To conclude, considering the type of work I do and the fact that each carbide insert has 4 cutting surfaces I can't imagine ever having to replace all the inserts. If you typically use only straight grained hardwoods, or softwoods, I can't see a spiral cutterhead bieng worth the price, but if you consistantly work with figured woods, this cutterhead is absolutely worth it's weight in gold (which is about what it costs :eek: ) And the planed Koa?
Here is a pic of the timber waiting for a couple passes with the scraper plane, and then some finish. Have a good one!


-Ryan



OK, here are the first 5 photos atached in order ommiting #2 of the journal head since everyone can see that one. the remaining two I will attach in a reply on page 2.