A Little Mustard for the Shop

[mkepke]

Landed the Powermatic 15" planer/molder that recently came up on CL.

The machine came out of a commercial cabinet shop but has been used very little..the 'racing stripe decal' around the base is a little scratched up, but otherwise even the paint is pristine. The 5HP motor ought to make some shavings alright.

I paid full asking, since the seller had received a lot of interest in this machine and knew it was priced to sell. Price paid mitigated by the superb condition and the 4 sets of molding knives (crown/case) and an unused set of planer knives.

Not too much trouble to muscle the machine's 430# into the old minivan..remove the drive belts, disconnect the start/stop button wiring and then 4 easily accessible bolts hold the top to the base. Then all you gotta do is lift a ~300# section and a 130# section. Piece o' cake.

I will be replacing my 13" Craftsman planer/molder with this machine. The two are strikingly similar in design - at first blush even the knives look interchangeable - , although the PM is a more refined and powerful machine. <shameless plug> Anybody thinking about a lunchbox planer ought to consider the Craftsman which I will be posting to Classifieds. The performance compares favorably with the high-end lunchbox planers, I will price fairly and the machine delivers molding capability too.

-Mark

 

[Ray Martin]

Mark,

Congrats on a terrific tool score. You rock. ... now if I just had a bit more shop space... and a lot more money...

 

[Ken Massingale]

Congrats
Mark, you still got a super deal.

 

[dpsnyder]

Congrats! You must be the guy that beat me out on that deal! Guess I was a little slow on the draw.

Hope it works well for you,
Dan

 

[Jim Roche]

Nice get! I saw that listed too and thought somebody is going to get a very nice planer at a very nice price. Enjoy that baby!

Jim

 

[Trent Mason]

NICE score Mark! :eusa_danc:eusa_danc:eusa_danc Looks like a nice upgrade. I'm approaching blade change time for my Ryobi. Just hoping it isn't too bad or I might have to go without before getting an upgrade. :BangHead::BangHead:

 

[cpowell]

Nice lookin chunk of iron you got there. Good on ya for jumping on it so quickly. :eusa_danc :eusa_danc

I don't have any PM in my shop but I gotta tell you I like the look of the mustard machines.


Chuck

 

[Mt. Gomer]

whoa, congrats man!

 

[Bas]

Looks like a sweet machine... nice score! :tool:

 

[McRabbet]

I saw that one when it first came onto CL (I use Google Alerts) and really wanted to jump on it, but it was too far away to get there to examine in a timely way. Great score on your part, Mark -- that is going to be a real workhorse.

 

[mkepke]

Dan, Rob - It was sheer dumb luck that I happened to be cruising CL minutes after the ad was posted. I also use Google alerts but I must have something misconfigured because this ad never triggered an alert :icon_scra

By another stroke of luck, after the seller called me back yesterday he said he was going hunting for the rest of the day so the earliest he could meet me (or anyone) was Sunday AM. Lucky for me because I couldn't have gone to see the machine yesterday - I had Boxing Day plans.

How does that saying go: "I'd rather be lucky than good" ?

-Mark

 

[WoodWrangler]

WOW! Very nice there Mark! You gotta be a happy camper!

 

[bwat]

Nice score and a valuable addition to any ww shop!

 

[Travis Porter]

Sweet! Congrats on the score. How easy is it to change knives back and forth?

 

[Matt Schnurbusch]

Glad it went to someone here. I saw it and about wet my pants. Way out of my price range anyway. Maybe someday. So many toyls too little money!

 

[mkepke]

Sweet! Congrats on the score. How easy is it to change knives back and forth?

Depends on the width of the molding knives you want to use.

If the molding knives are 4" or less wide, you can leave the planer knives installed, in which case installing or removing the molding knives is probably a 15 minute job (pull gibs, install molding knife, install counterweights, reposition chipdeflector, reset feedroller height, install molding guides).

Over 4", you need to remove the planer blades. Which makes switching from molding to planing like installing fresh blades in a conventional planer, plus some additional time to reset the chip deflector and reset the height of the feed rollers. With experience, probably 30-40 mins, unless you have a deathly aversion to changing knives (no names will be mentioned).

Grizzly's put some nice little improvements into their portable 15" molder/planer that I wish were in this Powermatic: indexed knives and presets for the feedroller height.

A nice feature of most of these type molders is that you can run multiple molding knives simultaneously. You could load the cutterhead with say, a crown, backcut, casing, and base-cap knife and run most of the trim for a house w/o swapping knives.

-Mark

 

[sawduster]

You [PIE]ROCK ![/PIE] :icon_thum :eusa_clap :icon_thum :eusa_clap