Dewalt DW735 Stand Base Template
admin on August 13th, 2008
Recently, I wrote a brief review of the Dewalt DW735 planer. After my initial post, it occurred to me that I had missed something quite important. Recall, the DW735 is a “portable” planer, which is a really positive spin on “you don’t get a stand”. I don’t know about you, but my workshop suffers from a shortage of bench or table space, which means that the DW735 was initially a real thorn in my side. You can buy the DW7350 base from Dewalt, but the base, the absolutely essential DW7351 infeed and outfeed tables, and the planer sum up to about $700, which requires special wife funding approval (for me, at least).
As it turns out, it’s pretty easy to make a good solid base for the DW735. The trickiest part is the part that fits on the bottom of the planer. I made one out of 3/4″ plywood that fits snugly up inside the cast aluminum base of the DW735. At right is a dimensioned drawing of my base, which I drew in Google Sketchup 6. If you’re familiar with Sketchup, I have included my model file here. I cut the whole thing on my table saw, but a jig saw might work better for some of the nooks and crannies.
Originally, I planned to bolt the planer to the plywood base using the holes in the DW735’s aluminum bottom, but with the planer’s considerable heft and because the entire plywood base fits up inside the aluminum base, there was little concern of it jumping off the base and onto the floor.
With my plywood base in order, I set about building the stand for the planer. This really isn’t fancy, but it does the trick nicely. I used some old 2×4’s I had laying around, some scraps of plywood, glue, and pocket hole screws. On the picture at right, the planer feed direction is from right to left. You can see here, and in the next photo, that the piece of plywood we talked so much about only fits under the middle of the planer. The two strips of 3/4″ plywood under the base fit under the wider part of the planer, and are 19.5″ by 2.5″ wide, while the whole stand is 20.5″ wide for a little extra stability.
I finished the stand off with 1/8″ hardboard on the front and back, mostly because I had some around. I think the hardboard also stiffened things up a little, but I’m not sure about that. The bag of Quikrete is key, as the heavy planer on a light stand was a bit top heavy.
I realize, of course, that I won’t be winning any design awards for this thing. It’s not especially pretty, but the price was right (pretty much free) and it’s really stable. The whole stand took me a rainy afternoon, got the planer out of my way, and finally created a place for the one bag of Quikrete left over from my deck project.
