Given that I wasn’t working I felt the need to save money and make as much of the stuff that I needed from scrap that I had lying around. So obviously I bought a new toy:
It’s a 10″ (250mm) wide planer/thicknesser from Charnwood (model PT250?) and I have to admit that I’m quite impressed. I’ve not used it that much for squaring up sawn timber, but it’s seen a lot of use planing timber to a required thickness and the speed at which it turns wood into man-glitter is quite impressive: a decent workshop vacuum is certainly required. My only current criticisms of it are that the fence must be removed to fit the vacuum mechanism when thicknessing and that it uses one-piece knives (rather than a spiral cutter for instance, which is considerably more expensive). Sadly I’ve already wrecked one set of knives by failing to spot one nail in a piece of recovered timber I was using. Hard to say that’s not my fault however rather than that of the machine.