My new (strictly speaking it’s used but just recently come into my possession) planer. Grizzly G1021.
Frankly, I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. My wife asked what I needed it for. I really couldn’t come up with a plausible need. I put that piece maple through it though and found that it makes very fine garden mulch. Plus it’s much quieter and takes much larger wood than my chipper. The downside is that it’s much harder to move around the yard.
This is the third of four pieces of equipment that I’ve kind of floundered onto in the past couple of months. This is the only one that I actually dished out cash for..
I had been thinking of purchasing a planer. My original thought was a nice little bench topper. My sister-in-law’s husband had seen one buried in a barn while looking at a RV. An ailing widow who was wanting to liquidate her late husbands lifetime accumulation of the stuff guys haul home.
The place was like something from American Pickers – something like it in that there were piles of junk salted with a few salvageable artifacts. Luckily the planer was in a nice little wood shop built off the barn and buried only under a small stack of lumber. I asked how badly she wanted to get rid of it. Her husband had paid $500 for it used, she thought. She figured $250 might be a fair price. I was noncommittal.
I cleaned out around it to get a better look. It looked pretty clean aside from the covering of dust. The lubrication appeared to have dried out a little but everything seemed to move up and down smoothly. The little bit of surface rust on the table would probably polish away. I gave it a heft to get an idea of moving logistics and was immediately reminded of my doctor’s warning about hernia repair. Taking pity on the poor widow, I told her the $250 was acceptable.
I returned about a week later with two son-in-laws who hadn’t yet been advised about weaknesses in the abdominal wall. In a scene that most likely would remind you of a phrase concerning monkeys and a football, we wrestled it into my truck.
For various reasons it was decided that we would set it in my sister-in-law’s husbands shop. The use of a chain fall and a couple of straps for unloading let us feel like we’d moved up the evolutionary chain from monkeys to tool users.
Over the next couple of days I refurbished the lubrication and temped it into the electrical panel. Yesterday I fired it off. I think I’ll be happy with it. The 3 hp motor handled that wide chunk of rough cut maple as easily as it handled a cedar 1×4. I think I’ll go into the mulch business.