Iron Wood????

I finally saved up the money and purchased the electric planer I wanted. I had spent a good month or so saving and researching which one I wanted. I had started out with a budget of $200-300. Ultimately the reviews I read led me to conclude that my original budget wasn't going to afford me a planer I was going to be confident would do what I wanted it to do, so I ultimately spent about $560 for this one.

While I read the instructions (yes, I will be surrendering my man card later this week ;) ) my friend Addam was trying to figure out how the dust vent attached to the planer. One nice thing about the planer, it came mostly assembled, so it was pretty quick to get into action.

After assembling it we took it out and set it on my current work bench and ran a board through it a couple times to ensure it worked.

I had wanted to buy a planer stand from the store I got the planer from, but they didn't have any in stock. So after some consideration I chose to build my own stand. The tow main requirements was it needed to be easily moved and it needed to be fairly rigid.

I drew up a basic design on some paper and then went to the local steel yard. I had originally wanted to make it out of square tubing, but this rectangular tubing was what was on sale, so I bought some. The wheels will help to fulfill the ease of movement requirement.

Here's the start of welding pieces together.

I had started out trying to contour the metal to fit perfectly. Here I used a file to try and curve the hole to fit. When welding, how well things fit will have a huge impact on how the weld looks and how well it will hold.

After getting the two sides welded together, I felt they were not square enough and ultimately decided to redo it. Part of the problem stemmed from how I was cutting the tubing. I was using a high speed cutoff saw, and unfortunately found it was difficult to get all the sides square and straight.

Since the high speed cutoff saw wasn't working, I bought an abrasive wheel and installed it on the miter saw. It worked amazingly well for a short time. I made about half the cuts I needed too before burning the motor out ;(

Cutting metal places a lot of strain on a saw motor, and this one was over 12 yo, so not an enormous loss I suppose.

Here's a pic showing how I was holding the tubing to cut it, before the saw died obviously.

Once I killed the miter saw, I had a few choices. I could go back to using the high speed cutoff saw, I could buy another miter saw and hope I don't kill it, or I could buy a purpose built saw. After thinking it through for a few days I decided to buy a purpose built saw, and here is my new Dewalt Cutoff saw.

Over the last few years I've done enough metal working and wanted one of these, so I felt the $200 investment would be worth it. I'll have to purchase a miter saw later.

The Dewalt made very quick work of cutting the remaining tubing. It felt like cutting through stiff butter, definitely worth the money!

Here I'm beginning to tack the pieces together. I only tack them together till I get the sides completely assembled. This has saved me a few times, as I've put the wrong pieces together and a tack weld is much easier to cut through than an entire welded seem.

I've finished tacking the sides, and happy with how it went together, I completely welded the seems. I'm now beginning to tack the pieces that will hold the two sides together.

Most of the cross pieces are now in place on one of the sides. I'm still only tacking the pieces on.

I've managed to tack most of the cross pieces on and the next few pictures are me using clamps to help line everything up. Unfortunately, whether due to poor cutting, the contortion of the metal due to welding, or my own lack of skill, things didn't line up as perfectly as I'd have liked. But I'm pretty please with how it has come together so far.

Here's the high speed cutoff saw I was referring to in the beginning. It's a very versatile and useful tool, but it just wasn't accurate enough for what I needed when cutting the tubing, however, it's perfect for what I use it for next.

Here's the frame of one of the wheels. I used the high speed cutoff saw to trim this shorter since it was more than the 2" of the tubing's width. Here I am using a drill press to drill a new hole to replace the other two that were chopped off when I shortened it. The metal tubing helps to keep the wheel frame from moving down when the drill bit starts to engage it.

This will be the cross piece that holds the wheels.

The circled area is where I ground a weld so it was flat. This is where the wheel cross piece will be welded.
Here it is almost done.

The wheels are attached.
Hooray, it's all mounted up! If you look on the lower left section, you'll notice that corner is cut, this allows the stand to be tilted forward and then the wheels engage the ground.

The boards are planed and will be edge glued. I'll be cutting them to size and then mounting them between the planer and stand.

Now that the planer is mostly finished, can get back to work on the bench.