Comments on: Helical Cutterhead Makes Better Tenons

By: norton7910

norton7910 — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 02:20:45 +0000

Me too. Best upgrade I ever made. I even gave my son one for his jointer.Too bad he will never know how frustrating and time consuming trying to set up new blades is and I even hated to use my newly set up blades for fear of nicking them.

By: Steve_OH

Steve_OH — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 04:48:20 +0000

The ridges are on the thousandths-of-an-inch scale. I have a Shelix head in my jointer. With my smoothing plane at a fine setting (about 0.002″ shaving thickness), it takes only two passes across the surface to completely remove any traces of the jointer cutters. There’s not much chance of operator error causing a problem in that scenario.

(That said, there are apparently some other insert-based cutterheads around that are worse–in some cases much, much worse–than the Shelix head, in terms of how much clean up is required.)

To put it into an overall perspective, I hand plane virtually all of the surfaces of my projects, and after using a Shelix cutterhead in my jointer, I will never, ever go back to steel knives. And as soon as I can justify the cost, I will replace my planer with one that accepts a Shelix head, too.

-Steve

By: Justin Tyson

Justin Tyson — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 21:19:21 +0000

I’ve never used helical blades, but I’ve actually read here and elsewhere that lumber dimensioned with them requires less smoothing with hand planes because there is less tearout than with straight knives. Tearout would be a lot trickier to deal with than the tiny ridges left by the helical cutter head.

By: Mitch Wilson

Mitch Wilson — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 13:25:13 +0000

Glen- last year, when you replaced the shop’s planer cutterhead with the helical one (do you do auto transmissions, too?), didn’t you say that with the multiple knives that you had more surface ridges and irregularities than with standard straight knives? Wouldn’t this, in turn, require further surface preparation with your hand planes, thus negating the time saved? Also building in a higher chance of getting inconsistent thickness due to operator error.