Sharpening Wood Planer Blades on a Milling Machine.

[teletech]

I have the 30 inch version of that Buss Planer.

Nice, that must be a monster. Took me forever to set the blades if I wanted good work. I had knives made from old papercutter blades but I fantasized about an indexable-insert head.
I hope you find some suitably substantial material to feed it now and then!

 

[mike44]

I also used to use a mill to sharpen jointer and planer blades. I made a jig that sits at 50° and bolts to the table with Tee nuts. The jig is 1/2" x 1-3/4" x 17" with a lip milled to hold the blade vertically and at 50°. A piece of 1/4" x 1-3/4" x17" is bolted at each end and 3 more places spaced along the jig and below the blade. The face of the cup wheel does the grind.
A cup wheel usually takes 2 passes to sharpen the blades. If a nick is still present I shift one blade slightly when installing. This will remove the line as you plane.
I stopped sharpening my blades when I tried Ridge Carbide which does excellent work at a reasonable cost. Also I brush lard oil on the blades, keeps grinding dust down besides a coolant.
mike

 

[Newman109]

As far as I know, no one makes a helical cutter head for the Parks Planer. I guess that it would be nice, but with proper setup you can do some excellent work with the standard planer blades.

I bought my Parks in good condition but with some surface rust about 50 years ago from a dealer in Los Angeles .Cleaning it up was quite a chore and ultimately, I took the machine all the way down to its gutty works.to get it nice and clean. That took most of a gallon of 70% phosphoric acid and a lot of scrubbing and scraping as I recall.

Mine has the factory stand but it needed a dust collector and a belt guard.I made those out of riveted sheet aluminum at the time but it needs a better belt guard so I'm in the process of making one out of 1/8" cold-rolled steel as we speak.

As I mentioned earlier, my son wants to build a guitar and wanted my help. In the past the Parks has done excellent work planing guitar woods down to as thin as 2 mm. The wood is held on a piece of MDFB with double-sided carpet tape. With nice sharp blades, properly set, it does a great job.

We have the wood for his guitar now. It's a set of Pao Ferro (Bolivian Rosewood) and the backs and sides came from the seller band-sawed to 3/16".

I have lovely piece of quarter-sawn 2"X10" Sitka spruce for a top that I've saved for many years. I'll re-saw that on my 14" Delta band saw and then plane it to size. I added the factory 6" riser on that years ago so that I could re-saw with it. It takes a longer blade (105"} with the riser. I use a 3/4" 3-4 skip-tooth blade for that purpose.

Anyway, a good planer and band saw are lots of fun!