Thread: What am I doing wrong ?

I don't know that thicknesser... but can you slow the feed rate? It sounds to me very much like it's feeding too fast, and spotted gum is a beggar to thickness with a good finish anyway. (A prime candidate for a drum sander in my books. )

Perhaps the feed roller is slipping, allowing the blades to "pull in" the timber by a small increment on each cutting pass?

Skew,
It is actually at T260 and unfortunately the feed rate is fixed. While i was checking the belt tension I did look at the feed roller and it seemed OK but I had a similar thought whether the roller needs to be lowered but I couldn't see a way around this. I do have a wide belt sander but to remove the machined grooves in the back of the floorboard stock I have to take off 3-4mm.

Regards

Mike

Bummer. Sadly, I can't offer you anything but guesswork.

I'm pretty sure that one or two members here have the same machine (at least, I vaguely remember someone talking about buying one) so hopefully they'll be able to offer some more productive advice. [fingers Xed]

A paper by Dan Barber cites a third source of snipe as improper alignment of infeed and outfeed tables. I'm not sure where I got it, but Google [barber badger snipe] should find it. Yep; sure did - pdf file.

{This is a generic paper, and YMMV of course. If the machine doesn't have provision for micro-adjustment, you might have to add some jackscrews between the tables and your bench. Or something like that.}

Joe

Joe,
I get the problems with the thicknesser setup where the timber is on the flat table and the blades spin over it so there is no alignment possible, it is one table but thanks for the reference for planer arrangement.

Regards

Mike

Mike

Have a look up at the business part of your thicknesser - you will see it consists of an infeed roller, blades mandrill and outfeed roller. These are naturally aligned with the wood going through the machine. If either of the two rollers is off the end of the wood then it changes that natural alignment and snipe may occur.

I use a push stick the same thickness as the stock being planed. I push the end of the stock into the the thicknesser and let the push stick follow the stock through the thicknesser. This stops the infeed roller dropping and prevents snipe.

Or at least it does on my el cheapo Icon thicknesser.

Cheers

Graeme

Problem solved,
This evening I have had some time to do a bit of investigation and I have found the problem. It was caused by plain stupidity on my part. I noticed that the blades were quite a bit proud of either of the infeed or outfeed rollers as there was some shavings that had got underneath the blade holder. When I last changed the blades I must have forgotten to clean out the dust under the holder. Having taken most of the mechanism apart I feel a bit of a prat at having wasted some good timber and a great deal of time due to an oversight. However, I won't do it again !

Thanks for all the advice.

Regards

Mike