Thread: Cant decide - Carbatec spiral head cutter or buy Dewalt and retrofit with Byrd?!

I recently upgraded to the true spiral head design but in the 15" if you can stretch the budget go for the real thing as they are awesome.

Hi,If your budge can only stretch this far you are a bit limited in choice.
I have been down this route myself and started out with separate benchtop and thicknesser both of which while eadequate for a while ultimately proved to be dissapointing.
The Thicknesser I had was a carba-tec machine with straight cutter was particularly disappointing as it was extremely noisy,and as I live on an estate was a real concern.The other major problem was it's rubber infeeed and outfeed rollers which soon started to wear out.

I personally doubt whether it would be worth the cost of retrofitting a Byrd/Shellix type head in either of these machines.

I ended up selling both benchtop machines and purchased the Carba-tec 10x8 combination machine which has a true spiral head.
Although not a cheap option at around the 2k mark I decided to do this as I was going to be making and selling furniture.

Depending on what type of work you are going to be doing and selling then the benchtop machines may be fine for you but as It will probably be one of the most important machines in your workshop you should give a lot of thought to it.

It is always worth looking out for older secondhand machines too.

Thanks, guys. Good advice. TBH, I probably shouldn't stretch the budget too much, but if I want to make a go at this, I'm better off investing in good quality machinery that does the job, not half a$$ing it. Mark, that combo unit looks brilliant, and at $2.3k covers what I need for my shop (sorely in need of a jointer and planer) and being in a small space, it's even more appealing. How do you find the change over from planer to jointer and back again?

How would you rate the Carbatec v Jet combos? I assume Jet is better given the price diff?

Hi,yes it's a pretty nice machine,I like the fact it is a true spiral which a lot of other machines pretend to be.
The changeover of function is a bit of a pain as you have to wind the table down to the 130mm mark when in surface planing mode.
Probably takes a minute or less to change over and good exercise on the arm !
The carbide inserts are expensive to replace but recently resharpened them all by hand on a diamond plate,took about 3 hours but was worth it,so will probably get another couple of years use out of them.
I paid $1700 for mine a couple of years back but prices have risen sharply.

I use it mostly for planing Jarrah,Marri and other hard timbers and the finish is nothing short of spectacular IMHO.

Excellent, Mark. I think I'll go that way, actually. I will be also milling a lot of really hard wood as I buy a lot of recycled old timbers at a great place outside Melbourne called Urban Salvage, and this stuff is practically petrified! I'll need something that can keep up with that kind of timber. Now I guess it's the choice between the Carbatec or the Jet...The Carbatec is out of stock, should find out when they might be getting some more...

Which Jet machine are you looking at ?
Both the standard 10" and 12" from jet are not spiral head only the $4000 jet has the spiral head as far as I now.

I've gone down the Dewalt route, even bought the Byrd cutter to retrofit but it's taken something like 3yrs to kill the original Dewalt blades....I also bought a set of in-feed and out-feed tables off amazon for the machine; very pleased with the purchase as I believe a number of other forum members who have the same machine....cheers, crowie

spend the money buy the best you can - part of the reason is because you are going commercial.

If I ever need to upgrade my planer it will be a SCM.

Like crowie I have the DW and the feed tables but not the head. It was perfect for me when I bought it but if I was buying now I would spend the extra and go a floor mount 15" spiral or helical. the DW is a really great machine but it does have its limitations.

I am 50/50 on buying a Byrd or upgrading right now. If I had the money I would upgrade but I am undecided. I could probably get a good price for the DW and put that towards a CI job and the Byrd is really expensive ATM due to the rubbish exchange rate but so are new machines for the same reasons.

Anyway, enough of my ramblings, I think you are doing the right thing by going for a decent machine now, you will not regret it.

John

I made do with a little Electra Beckum 260 for decades. Then I decided to upgrade to something bigger, the old
dear doesn't owe me anything and it's really getting past its use by date.

Got all enthused about spiral cutter heads, and in the end I went for a CT 381 because Grizzly is having a special
on the shellix heads for this machine. ~ 530 USD. I was going to get my nephew to bring one over for X-mas, and
they assured me they'd have restocked by November 30th.
Grizzly peed on my parade - they told my nephew after the first week of December they would not restock for at
least another 6 weeks, so that date would miss his flight date and we cancelled the order. No spiral head for me.
A savings of ~ 800 NZD which is also not bad.

You know what? I am actually really happy with the finish I am getting off the vanilla HSS blades in that machine.
Yes, it's noisy, but I can't figure out where the majority of the noise is coming from, it's just as noisy when idling as
it is when cutting 6" of bluegum - I don't hear much difference wearing my Peltors.

If I had known how things would pan out, I would've bought the TH 410 from machineryhouse .... a bit more width,
a bit more depth, and great styling and accessibility of the sharp end. {kicks self, but not with much conviction}

I have the carba tec 15 inch spiral and cant fault the performance. knife replacement is expensive though. carbatec want $90 (last week 15/12/2015) for a box of 10 inserts. you need 74 for the machine. do yourself a favour and buy online.

I have gone off spiral inserts after bad experiences with an 8" jointer, as I end up with ridges and valleys the full length of the workpiece, even with variations in height of the inserts of just 0.002" ( 2 thou) across the width of the outfeed table. You will never get them any better.

With regards the Dewalt, I have one of them, it is a real screamer ( 95dBA confirmed by tests), and adding a $600 spiral head doesn't reduce the noise level, and the finish quality is not that good, as per my first comment above. So why would you? the 3 blade Dewalt with two speed operation gives an excellent surface with three blades

Here I was reading through this thread the other day thinking it would be nice for a new thicknesser, but couldn't justify it, when today.... BAM.... The old 12inch sherwood bench thicknesser blew up on me.

Its been on the way out for a while.
-The switch doesn't work anymore (pulling the plug out does though)
-The height moves under duress, and I don't trust the gauge
The chip extraction works well (hooked up to the dust) so it isn't all bad.

I purchased it secondhand about 3 years ago for $150 just to see if I would use it, and to see if my woodworking would continue as a hobby....

Now that I'm sure that I do need one, I need a new one. These were the two I was considering, as space is quite the premium in my shed.

From what I can read here, people who own the deWalt owners certainly are happy with them, and I can always upgrade later to the better head (its only a hobby so I can't really justify that expense in one hit) or should I rearrange the shed, squeeze a little more space somewhere and have a floor model mounted on wheels and reduce my elbow room that little bit more.

I think if I went down the larger thicknesser road, I'd keep my eye open for a second hand model as new I'd only be looking at the cheaper models so I think an older model may be more my cup of tea (tired and tested).

I don't really think there is any questions here, just my thoughts and by putting it in writing I'm likely to actually put my plans into action a little quicker.

Cheers

Gabriel