jonathan draney ordered this nice shelix carbide cutter head to use in my jointer and i want to
compare how much that changes the noise level power consumption and cut quality but first i have
to do the before test with the old head i have it set up to remove 1.2 millimeters of material
the dial indicator is metric and each turn is one millimeter so that makes 1.2 millimeters to take
off and i'm going to measure the power consumption using a smart plug and a computer to record and
graph it and to ensure i pass the material across at a consistent rate i've got this little winch
here which is operated by a foot pedal and that'll pull my stock across using this hook
and turn on the jointer dust collector
now one thing that's funny with this jointer is dust collection makes it dramatically louder so
even if it spins just a little wee bit
at low speeds it's quite loud whereas with the dust collector off
much quieter and then i ran a whole bunch of samples across the jointer
recording the noise and the power levels
got a bunch of before tests done now it's time to swap the head
the tables are kind of awkward to remove and this is the first time
i've removed the ouchy table since i built it 11 years ago
i guess there is a little bit of dust that made it under the outfeed table
seems to be kind of stuck on there
no it's the wrong way
there we go counterclockwise thread well that pulley seems to be stuck on there pretty good now
ah there it goes
and i only cut myself a little wee bit
and the key
unlike the old head this has got a clockwise screw
it doesn't matter that much because the key prevents things from spinning
so one of the advantages of a shillings counterhead is
they're supposed to be much quieter but uh this is not a good sign not at all
so i just removed one carbide cutter head just to try it again and
a bit louder than before i think this thing is just kind of out of balance
this shouldn't be jumping like that this head is out of balance i'm hesitant about putting
the jointer back together right now because i have the feeling that i'll be taking it apart
again real soon so i just measured the power consumption of this thing now versus before
and before i was idling at about 485 watts now it's 651 watts that's either because this has
more wind resistance or the bearings are using up that much power we'll see how hot they get i
rerun a lot of my test samples and looking at the video now it's a lot quieter than it was before
and that sound was recorded with this camera with audio agc off and both times in the same position
that i marked right here as for those bearings and idle power consumption when i turn it on
quite often i see par consumption of about 750 watts idling but then it always drops off and
here after about a minute it's down to under 600 watts and after that i can feel the ends of the
cutter head a little bit warmer so this is just a matter of the grease and the bearings getting warm
and the bearings on the old head spin really freely
except they're not really supposed to do that somehow these things
probably need to be re-greased this is a brand new bearing of the same size and this one
i just can't get it to spin freely like that at all now comparing power consumptions old is in red
new and blue idol of course went up planing went up a lot more calculating the planing minus idle
i had 1.92 times as much power to do the actual planing even though i removed slightly less
on a different one i removed a little bit more i had a hard time getting these exactly right and
this time the power consumption was double so for doing the actual work of planing the shelix head
uses about twice as much power and i guess that's really no surprise because this is a knife on my
old planer head and imagine the carbides which are screwed on there like that you can see how this
is much more of a cutting edge whereas this edge actually almost goes down to the center of the
head so this is more of a scraper whereas this is more of a cutter i resawed the plane surface off
of some of my work pieces so i can compare the new and old cuts side by side this was cut with
the old planer head and this was a shelix head and with the light just right you can see differences
fairly well so we have lots of fine lines from the knives here with the shelix head much less so
down here you can really see some of these lines and also with the shellix head
right about here we have some tear out right here with the shiela's head with the old head possibly
the grain wasn't as bad here because it had less trouble but there's a little bit of chunks torn
out here i do have some uh chunks pulled out here which with the shellix head i didn't have it all
with the lamp on the side you can of course see or i've got some nicks in the knives on my old head
but you can see some faint lines there's one right here there's another one here so possibly some of
these little cutters on the shelix head weren't perfectly aligned here's another comparison and
of course we can see the line from the nyx right here whereas here there's much less of that
and we see fewer lines from the knives and both are quite shiny another chunk with the old head
where i've got some tear out here and then on the whole surface there is a little bit of
speckling i think that's from chips getting caught between the knives and the wood itself that's a
problem with my joint you're not so much with a straight knife head but on the other side we see
none of that sort of defect and even though we've got some difficult grain here it's nice and smooth
here's some spruce there's some small bits of tear near the knot here overall pretty good a
little bit of speckling from chips getting caught between the knives let's do the after
and here's the after still some tear right here overall pretty good uh it's hard to tell
the difference here's another piece uh this one you can see the speckling from the chips
quite a lot and of course the lines from the knicks and here's after we see some faint
lines across from the cutters and with the light across we see some lines along
from the cutters not being perfectly aligned and some slight scalloping because each cutter
makes a bit of a scallop in there and some roughness along here that actually does feel
a little bit rough i wasn't seeing that before and total power for this cut was uh 2000 watts
previously i did that with 1200 watts but the increase over idle was 1400 watts whereas before
that increase was 750 watts so once again the actual cutting action takes nearly twice as much
power now i've been doing most of my tests by pulling the piece through with a winch
but if i don't use that and i push the piece through manually i really have to push on
it hard because those scraping things they really push back hard against the work piece
now some of those little divots from chips getting caught on top of the knives i probably made that
a lot worse by setting the knives really low in this head that was an effort to make it quieter
but i think it just doesn't give it enough room around here for the chips so if i end up
putting this head back in i'll set the knives a millimeter higher i also need to re-grease
those bearings but if i do keep this head in here i have to do something about balancing
it because it just sounds like something's about to explode or maybe it's the bearings
i just don't like the sound of this
well the carbide head wins this one for sure i see a very faint streak starting at the
nail but it seems to fade out after a bit so possibly this wasn't so much damage to
the head but maybe some bits of metal that got caught on the edge of the head
but here's what a screw does to a conventional cutter head fortunately this was not in my planer
now i can't say right now whether overall i prefer the old head or the new head they both have their
advantages i will definitely leave it in there for now just to get bit more experience using it
you