Thread: G'Day from the Redland Shire East of Brisbane,

The first post is intimidating...

I'm a Carpenter/Joiner by trade and have always enjoyed the finer skills around detailed work rather than slapping a frame together. I'm still in the industry, office bound for many years with soft lady like hands

In my 20's a dabbled with wood turning and other pursuits, but due to a lack of time and $$$ I generally set aside woodworking until around 2 years ago when I purchase my first table saw albeit a Dewalt portable unit that I am still using today. In saying this, it is not that I hung up my apron completely, over this time I have built around 10 4WD storage units for myself and friends over the years along with home renovations and the like.

My latest interest is in puzzle making, particularly puzzle boxes. My brother shares the same inquisitive mind as I do so he is receiving "box 1" for Christmas.

I recently had the good fortune of being offered a 15 inch 3 HP Carba-tec thicknesser that had been upgraded to a spiral cutter head some years back. The going rate was $100 and yes you read that correctly. The gearbox was however shagged in that you could not change between the feed rates and many of cutter head blades had been destroyed but tightening the bolts along with the cast bed being quite rusted (bad surface rust)

I took the punt and jumped at the purchase after talking to Carba-tec about the availability of spare parts. Since then I have serviced the machine including replacing the pinion gear in the gearbox, bought one set of blades, removed all others, cleaned the spiral head and blades, re-seated them with the appropriate torque setting and spent many hours cleaning up the machine. All up I'm $275 in, that's including the purchase price! I now have an as new 13 inch cut machine that runs as sweetly as day 1. Another set of 10 blades will see the full 15 inch cut operational topping out the cost of the machine to just shy of $400.

Some days you have a win!