Wayward WorkshopWords of wisdom and tales of woe

I love my router. I just had to get that out of the way up front, so I don’t feel like I’m cheating. A few years ago, I purchased a 2 1/4 hp Bosch 1617EVS router that must be one of the most popular routers on the market, and for good reason. That router has always done everything I’ve asked of it and really hasn’t complained much. The only times I haven’t been entirely thrilled were when I was trying to hold my big router flat on a small, delicate part that I couldn’t bring to my router table for some reason. At those times, guiding a full-size router feels a little like giving a cat a bath: lots of wiggling and squirming, high blood pressure all around, and decidedly poor results. I distinctly recall thinking during one of those early adventures (with the router, no cats) that there must be a better way.

There is, and as soon as I saw a laminate trimmer, I knew that was it. Unfortunately, it took me a few years to work up to purchasing one. When I did, I conducted the normal search of likely alternatives. My favorites were the Ridgid R2400 and the Bosch PR20EVSK, but in the end I really liked the Bosch’s micro-adjust fixed base. Hang on, though, I’ll rave about that later.

When you open the box, the first thing that really strikes you is that the Colt bears an amusing likeness to the full-size 1617EVS router. Shortly after I got the Colt, I was using it in the presence of my wife, who I sort of forgot to inform of my purchase. She stared, somewhat puzzled, at the little router before deciding that my old router must have shrunk.

Out of the box, the Colt acts just like you might guess a little router would: It handles very easily and with no drama. The best part by a long shot is the micro-adjust base. Start out with a coarse adjustment and get pretty close, then hold the motor and rotate the base (or vice versa) a few degrees and the micro-adjust mechanism clicks into place. Then, a little thumb wheel rotates the motor relative to the body for an easy, precise adjustment. That might sound a little complicated, but in practice it works brilliantly.

One of my favorite websites, www.newwoodworker.com, actually reviewed the Colt twice: once with the micro-adjust base and again in “kit” form that includes three bases (including the micro-adjust) and lots of goodies. Tool Snob reviewed the micro-adjust model as well.

I now love two routers, but there’s plenty of love to go around. I hope to leave my big router mounted to its table most of the time and use the Colt for hand-held routing. The only small drawback that I can see is that I own almost entirely 1/2″ router bits, and I’m not too excited about buying a matching set of 1/4″ bits. That said, what could one more multi-colored box hurt…

For a non-professional wood worker, buying a planer is a big deal. Cheap ones are flimsy and promise horrendous snipe, rough surfaces, and endless sanding. More expensive planers are, well, expensive. In the middle is the Dewalt DW735, a well-designed, reasonably priced, relatively portable, two-speed, three-blade planer that promises glassy smooth surfaces and virtually no snipe. As you might expect, no tool has ever entered my shop with higher hopes and expectations.

For the most part, the DW735 delivers. The two-speed transmission and three-blade cutter head add up to 179 cuts per inch, which leads to super smooth surfaces. The DW735 also has an absurdly powerful blower built in that removes chips from the cutting surface and forcibly ejects those chips from the back of the planer (more on this later). The scale on the right side of the infeed is easy to read, precise, and perfectly calibrated out of the box. The “depthometer” on the front of the unit is extremely useful, as it tells you how much you’re about to attempt to remove.

If you’ve looked around the internet for the DW735, you might have noticed that it’s often pictured with shiny, flip-up infeed and outfeed tables. That’s because it’s mostly useless without them. Plan on $50 for the pair.

People seem to refer to the DW735 and other planers in its class as “portable”. I guess that’s technically true in the same sense that buildings, bulldozers, and boulders are portable. I’ve personally found the 92 lb. cube to be unpleasant to move and I hope not to for a long time.

Three of the most contentious features of the DW735 are the $50-$75 “disposable” blades. Many have stated that the blades were ruined within a few board feet of brand new, while others claim to plane thousands of board feet without replacing the blades. My experience is somewhere in between. After observing that the blades are quite flimsy, I committed to minimize stress on them by using the lower feed speed for hard woods and taking off only around 1/32″ to 1/16″ per pass. If you’re really nervous about the blades, take comfort in that Infinity Cutting Tools sells high speed steel (HSS) blades for the DW735 that can be resharpened.

I don’t consider myself to be a wimp when it comes to noisy tools, but the DW735 is light-fixture-shaking, spouse-irritating, neighbor-waking loud. Easily the loudest tool I own, I believe that any use without hearing protection would certainly result in instant hearing loss and a serious headache.

If you don’t own a dust collector, the DW735 (or any planer for that matter) presents something of a problem. I hooked the planer up to my 12 gallon shop vac only to realize that the blower in the planer has more blowing whoop than my shop vac has sucking whoop. I also tried a fancy cyclone trashcan lid, which relies on suction to stay stuck to the trashcan. The DW735 made short work of that idea, blowing the lid clean off the can, even with the shop vac running. In short, you need a dust collector. If you just considered letting the chips fly, I don’t recommend it. I planed a short walnut board with the included diffuser about 6 months ago and I’m still finding little brown chips.

In the end, the DW735 is a solid value, offering more features, capability, and quality than anything in its price range, but given the opportunity for a redo, I might hold out for a more expensive, “stationary” unit with an induction motor and blades that are meant to last. You can find another review at newwoodworker.com.