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9th December 2023, 08:33 PM #16Senior Member
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Was sold 'as is' with 6 month warranty. There are arguments under consumer law that this can't limit statutory rights, but in my considerable experience sellers generally don't understand or largely ignore relevant law. Like any other situation where might is right (notably insurance) if you don't get prompt acceptance of a claim or complaint you're in for a long fight because you have to do the work with complaints bodies (e.g. consumer affairs authorities, which are useless on small claims and many much larger ones) or consumer tribunals (which in Victoria are overloaded and have massive delays) or courts (where the processes and expense is out of all proportion to the money in dispute) once they refuse the claim or complaint.
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9th December 2023 08:33 PM # ADSGoogle Adsense Advertisement
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9th December 2023, 09:22 PM #17
I've not experienced problems with the anti-kickback but having said that I've not had a kickback.
Can you explain further what you mean?.
Yep I discovered this too.
Agreed. As a sidenote, I found using my 2hp dust collector works way better than my shopvac.
What insert?, you mean on the head?
Agreed.
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9th December 2023, 09:41 PM #18Senior Member
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I suspect that the vulnerability is a combination of the high efficiency of the drive rollers feeding timber into the cutters at a rate which the cutters can't accept efficiently, along with plastic and light alloy gears, so something gives. No doubt this is often due to the operator taking too big a cut, or very hard timber being fed in automatically at a faster rate than is suitable, rather than any inherent fault in the machine.
The springs on my rollers apply considerable force. On the broken one which I can use as a manual feed it's very hard to push timber through the first roller at anything more than about .25mm cut. So it's likely that the powered rollers can overpower the cutter in the same way that a car engine can overpower the brakes.
It's probably not a major engineering issue to fit a protective clutch in the system to deal with this, but it might add a lot of cost that manufacturers aren't willing to bear on entry level machines. A simpler solution might be to have adjustable pressure on the rollers so that they can operate as a protective clutch and spin on the timber when there is too much resistance at the cutter, instead of destroying the drive train. There might be a 'protective clutch' in a belt driven thicknesser where the belt might slip if the cutter head encounters severe resistance, although I don't know if such machines are available in the present market.
I do know that my ancient Gilbro belt driven jointer is a lot quieter than my chain driven modern one and I'd prefer a belt driven thicknesser if it's similarly quieter.
There is an unknown in this, being what sort of timber are these machines designed to cut? I expect they could cut pine all day every day for a very long time without problems, but probably not jarrah and harder woods.
A mate of mine worked for a major national tool and plant hire company many years ago. The company bought a large quantity of German made chainsaws, which had continuous problems. Turned out that the chainsaws were designed to cut pine type timber common in Europe, not Australian hardwoods. The German manufacturer’s engineer who came to Australia to sort out the problem was impressed that his company’s chainsaws managed to cut the hardwood at all, as it was way beyond design intentions.
Australia is unlikely to be a big enough market for a Chinese manufacturer to make an entry level thicknesser that can handle Australian hardwoods, so it might be that the machines are aimed at the very much larger American and European and other markets where softwoods are the main timber.
There are American, and for that matter Australian, timbers that are much harder than jarrah so it would be interesting to know from American members whether they have generic versions of this type of thicknesser, or planer in America, and how they perform there. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005...d=ekACFEEOhSCo
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9th December 2023, 10:01 PM #19
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9th December 2023, 10:09 PM #20
That doesn't explain the drive chain snapping without any load on the cutter head. Methinks an issue with gearing design would be a more likely explanation with my machine.
Otherwise I agree with your overall assessment of "lunch box" thicknessers. Built to meet a price point.
I feel that woodies have been treated as schmuks by our major retailers for a long time, as you case illustrates, and they know that it highly unlikely that an aggrieved customer will have much success seeking a remedy other than what the retailer "gives" them.Mobyturns
In An Instant Your Life CanChange Forever
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9th December 2023, 11:02 PM #21Senior Member
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Along with general machine design; material quality; and manufacturing and quality control standards.
I seem to be starting too many comments with 'in fairness to the retailers', but in fairness to them they're operating in a very small market in global terms and they choose the products they import and brand from what's available on Alibaba or whatever, perhaps not from the standard they, and especially we, want. Against that they could specify better standards but from what I understand of much Chinese manufacturing to Australian specifications you need your own quality manager on site, which isn't commercially justifiable for the relatively small volume of woodworking machines coming to Australian retailers, probably even if they combined to impose a standard. The end result is that you and I probably get what we could have bought unseen direct from Alibaba, but without the massively prohibitive transport cost for an individual machine.
As for aggrieved customers fighting retailers and others who will embark upon self-destructive legal trench warfare that makes no commercial sense, the best - or worst - and perhaps silliest example I've seen was a legitimate dispute with a major house builder following an independent inspector's defect report before handover. The report identified numerous problems, some quite serious. During a meeting between the builder's representatives and the customers one of the builder's frustrated representatives yelled to the customers, quite unaware of the irony, "You do realise that none of this would have happened if you hadn't got that f%^&ing independent inspection report?".
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10th December 2023, 07:39 AM #22
419, it seems you have quite a few stories to tell and a wealth of experience in the field of consumer complaints / protection. I agree 100% with your comments. Much as we don't like the deal we get at times I'm still thankful that we at least have access to markets, reasonable quality for the money in general, and that we are complaining about first world problems.
Mobyturns
In An Instant Your Life CanChange Forever
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10th December 2023, 11:07 AM #23Senior Member
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Exactly.
Also, the range of affordable woodworking and other machinery available to us nowadays is massive compared with what was available even thirty years ago. A lot of it isn't top quality but generally it does the job for a hobbyist.
I think I've mentioned elsewhere on this site that when renovating a house I found some late 1950s newspapers used as floor covering underlay, which included advertisements for electric drills. The same newspapers also had job ads. The price of the drills was about a week or more of a carpenter's wage. Now we can buy good quality cordless drills for less than half a carpenter's daily wage. Or a corded drill for very much less than that.
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14th December 2023, 02:45 AM #24Member
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- Dec 2014
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- Perth
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