Ryobi thicknesser planer RAP1500G

I previously decided that a helical head thicknesser is what I needed but I couldn't justify the up front price of what I wanted and I was determined to stay away from straight blade machines regardless of price. So I decided to continue to make do with hand planes and the table saw until Wednesday just gone. I had four sleeper size pieces of cooba to rip into planks and hand planing was doing my head in. In desperation the Ryobi was the only thicknesser in town so I bought it, plugged it in and planed away.

First impressions, holy cow it's loud. I used it on the concrete floor at first then put it on a plastic trolley today which seemed louder. Small pieces are tolerable but the twelve 2m x 190mm x 25mm planks required hearing protection. There's no way I'd try and take 3mm at a time as the specs state. Each quarter of a turn of the height adjustment handle equals 0.4mm change in depth and I used adjustments between 0.4 - 0.8mm. Anything over that required a second or third pass at the same setting before the blades stopped cutting and the depth achieved. So there must be some flex between the platen and the head for that to occur. At 1.2mm depths and a wide board it just didn't sound healthy for the machine. It coped, and didn't trip out but half a turn at 0.8mm is fine by me. I don't mind sending the piece through multiple times to get the right thickness or to simply flatten and remove saw marks.

The chip shroud and 50mm dust collector port was too small without a vacuum connected. For those boards mentioned the ejection port would clog after 1m of the board went through. Snipe was averted if the boards were fed at a slight downward angle and angled up just before the board exits. My 2m boards needed supporting by hand throughout each pass except for when it was half way through. I wouldn't rely on the tables and rollers alone for weighty or long boards.

Regarding the finish. The planks had some tear out, minimal planer blade marks and an occasional line left. All boards were 25mm rough sawn then planed to approx 21mm to flatten. Each edge of the 12 boards matched the thickness of their opposite sides and the measuring guide is adequate, not super accurate due to parallax error and I rarely looked at it. Just occasionally sighting it to make sure I was above 20mm because the final thickness we're aiming for is 19mm which will be done at a later date and it's expected that scraping and/or sanding will be a must. I'll add that after I thicknessed the twelfth board I measured thickness down it's length on both sides with vernier callipers and consitently found 21.7mm.

Overall I'm pretty happy with it. It's saved a bunch of hand planing and electric hand planing though not replaced them entirely. More importantly it's accurately dimensioned timber that I wouldn't have had the patience or skill to do entirely by hand. At 1500w it's less than the previous AP13 model which was 2000w but it still seems powerful enough. There was a couple of times I went for a thicker cut which saw the rollers loose grip a little on the wood but the blades never slowed. The more expensive straight blade benchtop machines have a few more features like pre-set depth stops, head lock, depth gauge and some with three blades. The DeWalt DW735 impresses but at $1k plus, you're probably going to want to start looking at helical or spiral head machines anyway. At $500 the Ryobi will do me for sometime though I've got a lot of redgum still to go through it. Blades are single sided and cost around the $60-70 mark. Down the bottom are some pics of the cooba after planing plus vac setup with an old dyson.

This machine looks the same as the older Mastercraft thicknesser sold by Canadian Tire and there's a couple of Canadian videos worth watching if you get this machine. The first is from Matthias Wandel who shows how to change blades and the second is from John Heisz who does a teardown after the rollers failed.

https://youtu.be/bJ4aUbjKXCg

https://youtu.be/nKDjRM3W6cA