2021 Product Showcase: Rikon Planer

We're really lucky to have Paul in the shop for this, 'cause he is pretty well versed in these planers. So Paul, give us, I know there's some stuff on here that you really, really like, give us the skinny on the Rikon planer. Sure thing, George. And yes, there's a lot to love here. I think, really starting with the power. So you've got a 15 amp motor that's really gonna take full advantage of the wide pass that you have with up to 13 inch width capacity. I also love the large threaded rod corner posts, four of them, which is gonna maintain even precision. So that's why you're gonna get consistency from side to side across even a really wide board that you would run through it. Prevents it from racking or walking off those threads. Yeah, exactly. Which is, it could be a common scenario. So that's really gonna keep things locked in place nicely. The other thing that I really like, or another thing that I really like is the two speed feed rate, which allows you to, for that final pass, really slow it down, give you more effectively cuts per inch, which is gonna give you a really the best possible cut quality as that wood come through. Now I know one of the things, speaking of cut quality, that you like are the replaceable cutters here. We don't have knives. We have individual cutters. So give us the low-down there. Exactly, and that's a really good distinction. Let me, I'm gonna help you out, let me block this out. Oh, good idea, let me lean it. Good, better view on the camera, there we go. Yep, great. So that's a really good distinction, the difference between knives and insert tooling. So at a high level, the knives are gonna remove wood in kind of a scraping motion. Pendulum swings through and scrapes wood out, leaving, if you look really close, if you looked at it with a microscope you would see scallops, a kind of a scalloped plane. Sometimes not even a microscope. Yeah, no, you're right. Yeah, with the right lighting you're absolutely right. With the right lighting, you can see that. And so what this insert tooling does is a couple things. One, it approaches at a different angle. It's a low profile, a low cut angle, so it's gonna remove that would in a shearing action rather than a scraping action. So it's gonna give you a cleaner surface, more like a hand plane removing that wood. And then it's also, because of the low angle and because of the design of this cutter head with the insert, you can see that you only have a small number of inserts across each row that are gonna be engaging the wood at any point in time. So that's the reason you'll notice that this style of planer is a lot quieter. And so planers are notoriously a loud, probably the loudest, if not, maybe one of the loudest tools in the shop. This quiets them down quite a bit. It's still gonna be loud, don't get me wrong, but it's gonna quiet it down really noticeably. So that's a nice combination of things. The other thing that's really cool about this cutter head is that it's machined in such a way that it can be brought to the market at an economical price point. So this allows this cutter head to be brought to the market at a price point that in the past the upgrade to this type of insert tooling would have cost as much as this entire planer. And it's something that's been kind of a holy grail of planers that people are looking for is can I afford to get an insert tooling cutter head. And here it is. Exactly. This brings it to the market at a price point that pretty much anyone who's looking for a planer is gonna be able to cost justify that price, the price point of that insert tooling. The other huge benefit of insert tooling is that you're able to swap those out so much easier than traditional knives. Anyone who has had a traditional knife planer and had to swap out those knives to have them sharpened. And reset them. Yeah, that's where it gets tricky. Resetting those knives is not for the weak of heart. Resetting these is very simple. You simply loosen it up, rotate it 180 degrees, drop it back down into place. As long as that surface is clean, it's gonna meet perfectly and be set at exactly the right angle and you're ready to go back up and running. So speaking of running, one of the things we did prior to this is ran material through and took advantage of the two feed speed in order to see the benefit that that offers. So let's have a look at that video. A Rikon planer's capacity is six inches in thickness, 13 inch in width. One of the cool things it's got going is a repeatability feature. A lot of times when you plane material you wanna get a number of pieces to the same thickness. One way to do that, run them all at the same time. But if you have to come back later and catch up on a piece, you can use this dial right here to do that. Set it to a specific dimension, as the planer head comes down, when it hits that dimension it's gonna stop. So we could set that to 3/4 inch, for instance. And then as we dial down to it, we're gonna come to a stop. Even if we come back later and run another piece, we're gonna come to that same stop, it'll be uniform in thickness. It's neat, as we're feeding material, sometimes it feels like we're spit-balling to figure out what is our first pass gonna be at, how much material are we gonna take off? There's a plunger right under that arrow. And its job is to tell me how much material I'm about to remove. Watch the gauge. That pointer is showing me how much stock removal I'm currently set for. Let's go ahead and that red oak through there. Easy peasy. The other thing that this plane has got going for it is two feed speeds. And the benefit to that is really when we get to pretty stuff, when we get to highly figured woods, like leopard wood, flame birch, birds eye maple, woods like this can have a tendency to tear out as we're sending them through a planer. If we slow down the feed rate we're getting more cuts per inch, CPI, gives us a better surface finish on any piece of wood, but is especially helpful on this figured stuff. Let's have a look at that. And, again, our woods here, leopard wood, birds eye maple, man, what a spectacular finish on there. I love those birds eyes. And then flame birch, look at the sparkle we're already starting to see out of that. That two-speed feature is a really nice aspect of this machine. So one of the things with that two feed speed, you mentioned it earlier, is getting more CPI, more cuts per inch. And I think on those really dramatic grain wood, birds eye maple, the flame birch, curly or quilted maple that are prone to tear out, that's really part of the payoff that we get there. Absolutely. Dust collection on this is good. We get good pickup right off of the unit. And that married to the high-speed steel cutters, insert tooling, two feed speed, I think they got a nice little planer coming our way here. Absolutely.