Placeholder17
Well-known member
I finished setting up a 1950's-60's Craftsman 6" planer (not jointer...) that I bought two months ago. I got the planer without a stand or motor, and the seller had removed the knives for sharpening but then presumably found them difficult to install/align and never put them back in.
Externally, it looked great with a fresh coat of enamel, but internally the spindle was rusted all over and somehow the last person to fiddle with it had managed to install every single set screw (spindle, pulley, bearing shims) off of the machined flats, leaving burrs and gouges everywhere, and put the one pointed set screw in the wrong hole.......... I had to spend way more time with a hammer and punch than I was expecting. The bearings were of course dry and had to be cleaned and repacked.
I threw it on a rolling food cart from the thrift store (after a lot of framing upgrades with plywood and 2x4s) with a 1/2 HP 3450 RPM motor. I used a 5" drive pulley on motor per the original manual.
Here is how the head assembly works as manufactured:
Externally, it looked great with a fresh coat of enamel, but internally the spindle was rusted all over and somehow the last person to fiddle with it had managed to install every single set screw (spindle, pulley, bearing shims) off of the machined flats, leaving burrs and gouges everywhere, and put the one pointed set screw in the wrong hole.......... I had to spend way more time with a hammer and punch than I was expecting. The bearings were of course dry and had to be cleaned and repacked.
I threw it on a rolling food cart from the thrift store (after a lot of framing upgrades with plywood and 2x4s) with a 1/2 HP 3450 RPM motor. I used a 5" drive pulley on motor per the original manual.
Here is how the head assembly works as manufactured:
- Bearings are slip-fit on the spindle shaft
- Cutterhead is slip-fit on the spindle shaft
- Cutter head has two set screws landing on flats on the shaft
- Bearings are a tight slip-fit into their bores in the head casting
- Bearings and spindle are locked in place axially as follows:
- The rear bearing shim/cover (next to the belt) has a full-perimeter groove into which a pointed set screw locks, setting the reference point for the cutter head/bearing assembly
- A pair of inner slip-fit bearing covers slide on the shaft on each side of the cutter head.
- The front bearing cover is pushed from outside in to press all of the covers and the spindle against the rear bearing, which is held in place by the notched shim/cover locked by set screw.
- The front bearing cover is then locked in place by a set screw.
- I found that that after reinstalling the head as described above, the front bearing had moved slightly outside of the bore.
- Perhaps there were missing washers or shims.
- I pulled everything apart and added (4) 1/2" fiber washers to the rear side of the spindle, so that after reassembly the bearings were fully recessed in their bores and the inner bearing covers sat partially inside the bores, keeping out dust.
- I put all the fiber washers at the rear to push the cutterhead away from the column to maximize space for adding a fence
- The spring is simply a bent piece of spring steel
- I ran to the local flea market, bought one of the innumerable rusty hand saws, and cut out a little piece with metal shears, which I then bent carefully in a vise using pliers.
- The kickback assemblies work great. You don't have to worry about constantly pushing on the wood while feeding. You can take your hands off, even with only one assembly engaged, and the wood won't budge.
- The manual says to align the cutter head to the table and then align the blades to the table with a blade-setting jig that that has disappeared from the earth (no luck trawling Ebay).
- Here is the alignment procedure that worked for me:
- Remove the head casting. The bolts are nearly impossible to reach from the open back of the column casting. It's far easier just to stack socket extensions and reach up from below the whole planer's open base.
- Stack a set of parallels (I had 1/8" thick parallels) on the flats of the cutterhead, and align the blades to the top of the stack.
- The blades were original as they had a Craftsman logo burned into them, but I don't know how many times they had been sharpened. They practically sat on the bottom of their slots in the cutterhead while being aligned to the parallels.
- Re-install the head. The table is set up to rock on curved supports cast into the planer knee. This allows you to adjust its parallelism relative to the cutterhead.
- The manual says to align the table to the head by laying a piece of wood on the table and turning the height handwheel until the wood locks into one of the flats of the cutterhead, rocking the table till it hits the cutterhead parallel.
- The problem is, you have almost no visibility while doing this with a board, so I used a stack of 123 blocks instead.
- I ran a board through the planer, but got 0.015" difference in thickness between each edge.
- Note, I used a cheap $20 set of blocks and the cutterhead itself may have had its own tolerances in flatness adding to the error.
- Also, since the knee casting always has a few thousands of slop in it while being raised/lowered on the ways, this error is also added in.
- I established which side was high, then put the 123 blocks back and loosened the table rocking bolts so that the table was still rather tight and would only rock with a lot of finger pressure.
- I then every so slightly forced the table to rock towards the high side of the cut, then tightened the bolts and ran another cut, and measured for the high side again. It took (3) tries in total to get the cut to only 0.003" variance across the width of the board, where I decided to stop.
- With independent fences, when planning a board that maximizes the width capacity of the planer, you risk running the board into the corner of the fence beyond for short pieces.
- I chose to make a new single-rail fence by cutting slots out of a piece of 1"x1"x1/8" aluminum angle.
- I slotted the angle twice, once to fit past the column casting (1/2" deep slot) and then to fit under the cutterhead and blades (left only 3/16" of angle projecting above the table)
- I don't plan to plane anything under 1/4" thick, so having 3/16" of fence below the blades works for me.
