I have to confess… I love milling lumber. It’s so cool to peel off a layer of rough wood to see what lies beneath. But I have grown tired of my Delta planer. It’s OK, and it has served me well for years, but its performance has been – how shall I put it – lousy.

It seems to work very well with straight-grained, thick hardwoods. It can plane those all day, leaving a bit of a divot at the rear, but better than satisfactory everywhere else. But, get that wood thin or figured and it’s Katie bar the door. I’ve seen rough board surfaces turn into moonscapes of tear out and snipe marks everywhere. Just awful.

There are plenty of tricks out there about how to reduce this nastiness. Build an extension board. Check. Take very light passes. Check. Moisten the top of the board before planing. Check. Push it through on an angle. Check. And, none of these tips worked. At all.

So, last night, when I got home from work, I decided the time was right to take the plunge. I grabbed up all the Home Depot gift cards I got for the holidays and trucked on down the road to big orange. There, I bought the latest and greatest Ridgid planer – the model  R4330 thickness planer.

Why this model? Well, first of all, I’ve had a lot of success with Ridgid tools – my spindle sander, miter saw and table saw are all nice and orange. This model also has a three blade cutterhead – and, from what I read, that gives a better result than the two blade cutters.  It has the Indicut control, which shows me when the cutterhead assembly contacts the board and how much material I’m taking off. Plus, I can’t get enough of the built-in dust collection. I hate shoveling the shavings after I plane boards with my Delta – they get everywhere.

I had fun loading it into my Corolla, and I hauled it to the shop with some help from my son Dominic. The assembly was very easy, consisting of putting together the dust collection shroud and the height adjustment handle. The fit and finish of the tool was very nice, and I loved the features such as on board tool storage for assembly and blade changes as well as a convenient cord wrap.

Sure, I should have read all of the directions carefully before I began, but DUDE, I needed to try it out!  So, I plugged it in and took some curly maple I had resawn and attempted to plane on the Delta (Boy, was that a bad idea). I figured that the pieces may already be a total loss, so what was there to lose?

I set the cutterhead to where it just kissed the board’s top and turned the motor on. I carefully fed the board through, and it slid right under the knives. OK, maybe a little lower next time. And, I could hear the knives just graze the board’s rough top. Another pass, and more knife contact.  Soon, I was removing the ugliness of the previous night’s attempt, and things were looking good. And, I mean REALLY good.

So good, in fact, that I believe that sanding these curly maple panels would ruin the very nice surface I put on them!  I didn’t think it was possible to get this kind of smoothness straight from the planer, but wow, I was totally impressed. And, yes, that board is 1/4″ thick… with that kind of smooth surface on it.  Unreal.

The planer does fold up into roughly the same sized footprint of the Delta, so stowage shouldn’t be an issue.  With this new planer, I think I can get over my phobias and start looking forward to getting more use out of the tool.

So, yesterday morning, was I ever surprised when Santa Claus came down our chimney and left me a new Pioneer car stereo. Sweet!

This now allows me to play my iPod on the system – heck, it charges the stupid thing, and I can control it from the stereo system faceplate. Or, if I’m feeling lazy in my compact car – use the silly remote control.

While I was sitting in my driveway installing this contraption (no, I had never installed a car stereo before.. this was gong to be fun), I read the directions very carefully to ensure I didn’t have to pull the center console apart a second time (I did). And, while trying to secure the four 10 mm bolts back into the deep recesses which secured the stereo mount, one fell off the socket and fell down behind the center console.  Damnit!  The instructions warned me several times to use magnets to capture the nut and keep it from doing this very thing.

I got the other three installed and was entering my second half hour of fishing for a bolt that I couldn’t see, when it hit me. Why the heck was I looking for it?  I grabbed the mount and shook it. It was rock solid. It didn’t shake. It didn’t shimmy. Nada. I made the command decision to just close up the interior panels I had to remove and get the car back into workable condition.

Why so cavalier?  Well, with me, when I buy a car, I tend to drive the sucker until it falls apart. We got rid of our 2001 Dodge Caravan earlier this year when the odometer clicked over 150,000 miles and the vehicle was preparing to wheeze its last. The Corolla the stereo is in is already five years old, and will probably be handed down to my oldest son when it’s time to go to college in four years.

So, who is ever going to notice this one missing screw?

I bring this up because I do obsess. I obsess about the condition of my tools. I like to leave them as close to the way I purchased them, not making any changes that could identify them as my own. Why on earth do I do this? I have no idea. Maybe it’s because I like to fool myself into thinking the tool is brand spankin’ new. Maybe it’s because I think should the absolute worst happen to me that my wife will be able to see my tools for what they cost me when I bought them.  Maybe it’s because I think I’ll ruin them if I modify them to work better for me.

I remember once when Jim Heavey was teaching a class at a Woodworking Show here in Tampa. He suggested that – perhaps – it would be easier for woodworkers to do a certain task if they scribed the exact mark on the top where the left side of the carbide teeth of a table saw blade would begin to cut. For some attendees, this was a nearly blasphemous statement.  How COULD Jim even suggest that someone defile the surface of his saw by doing something so permanent?

Well, Jim made it clear that when the time came to resell the saw, there was going to be a significant amount of depreciation – regardless of how much money was spent or how much time was lavished on its upkeep. And, that it was very proper – thank you very much – to customize your saw to meet your needs.

Many of you may have gotten tools under the tree yesterday. If you did, good for you! Now, get out there. Work with them. And, if they need to be modified to suit your needs… do so judiciously.

This week, I have to finish a set of pantry doors. I have this Rousseau router plate that holds my Freud FT2000 router. I picked it up about eight years ago.  Those little insert rings have never quite fit right – they have always been too tight. I have been holding off doing anything about this because – you guessed it – I didn’t feel right about ‘customizing’ the plate to meet my needs.

That ends today. If I’m going to get good results on my cope and stick joinery, I’m gonna need a very flat table. So, out comes the 220 grit paper and I’ll be shaving the rings down to size to make them fit.

The sounds of a happy client who got perfectly milled doors? I’m sure that will be music to my ears!