Silverline Bench Planer – 1800W, 150mm Width, Heavy Duty Wood Planing Machine for Workshop Use (344944)

I have only had chance to test it out a couple of times so I can't comment on reliability or how long the blades last, but I'm very happy with what it can do. It's worth spending some time setting it up (as per the instructions) to ensure the fence is square and the table is correctly calibrated. I had to mess around fitting some extra washers behind the fence to get the angle correct but this wasn't really a big deal. I tested it with some wood from an old pallet and was very pleased to find that I ended up with some nicely planed planks with square edges. It is a noisy machine and I highly recommend bolting it to your work bench so it doesn't walk off when in use. I'm surprised that it doesn't come with a push stick because you don't want your fingers anywhere near those spinning blades, I would also recommend safety glasses and definitely use the extraction port to vacuum away the plentiful wood shavings.

In my true click and buy way without reading info correctly, I didn’t read this one , and I expected it to be bigger, but that’s on me, what it is, is a small version of a great tool and it works great on shorter pieces it’s quite hard to plane long pieces I found but I don’t think it’s really designed for that, so product is good and value for money and will be useful on many of my projects.

Good value for the price. Taking a couple of mm at a time and it’s good. Not for site work. Be sensible with it and it will last.l

Very good indeed

Awful and not worth the money, very, very disappointed. Nowhere does it say that it has a limit to the height of the piece to be planed "safely". By removing the guard any sized wood can be planed BUT with the guard removed there is nothing stopping the timber kicking back. So here goes, the MAXIMUM DEPTH IS LIMITED TO 65mm...it differs from one end of the guard to the next due to the support bracket being held onto the machine by the thinnest piece of tin they could find. I know size isn't important but the picture makes this thing look huge when it certainly is not. The base of the machine is a plastic shell masquerading as metal. The extraction orifice isn't a standard UK size so this will need to be adapted. I have 4 off 100mm x 100mm posts to plane on all 4 sides, not looking forward to it, wish me luck!!

Apologies in advance but other reviews have already said pretty much everything I would (both good and bad) so instead I thought I'd try to help other owners who might be having difficulties. I was getting frustrated that none of the planed results seemed to have a right-angle anywhere among them no matter how carefully I set up the fence or fed the workpieces. They were visibly off by a good 3 or 4 degrees even after a very careful setup. If you're having this problem too, there are 2 main issues which are easily fixable and 1 which is less so. I'll deal with the easy ones first.Firstly, the fence. As others have already noted, it's pretty bad; not well fitting and not able to stand up at a full 90 degrees. The issue is that the brackets holding the whole assembly to the machine force the fence out of true when fully tightened, and there is not enough tolerance left in the vertical fence guides to compensate. This means that the fence sits at about a 92-93 degree angle from the bed at maximum. I tried to file the bracket to allow a little more movement but there was so little metal to play with that I was scared of weakening it to the point of failure.My solution (and I'm not proud of this) is a few hits with a deadblow mallet on each of the black uprights behind the fence, and checking each time with a try square until it lined up. This works but start gently! I'm sure there is a more engineering solution but this worked for me.Secondly, I made the mistake of assuming that the blade had been set up at the factory when it was installed so I hadn't immediately checked it. I wish I had as when I finally eliminated the fence issue and still wasn't getting good cuts, I had a close look at the blade with a straight edge and saw immediately that it was lower on one side that the other. I followed the blade replacement guide in the utterly appalling manual and was eventually able to loosen the ridiculously tight nuts (hint: they loosen clockwise when looking from the infeed bed to the outfeed bed) and then used the supplied gauge to reseat them. This isn't particularly tricky but no matter what, wear cut-proof gloves and keep the drum in an upright position otherwise it's possible to set the blade level but so high that it will hit the infeed bed (make sure you fully rotate the drum by hand with the infeed bed on the 0mm mark before firing it up).Final tip is to ensure that you press on the curved ends of the alignment gauge with finger and thumb of one hand and not the top bar whilst you retighten the nuts. This is because the spring pressure behind the blades is just sufficient to lift the ends and ruin the alignment unless each is held flush to the outfeed bed.These are the 2 easy fixes which made the machine usable for me. However the other elephant in the room is the aforementioned infeed and outfeed beds. Not only are these not perfectly flat, but because only the infeed table adjusts, there's a notable fulcrum around the blade drum, especially at the lowest depth settings. At best, this results in a snipe and at worst a tapered cut. The "solution" to this is a better machine design, but a workaround (short of stripping the machine and shimming) is, counterintuitively, to use a higher setting (1mm rather than 0.5mm). The reason for this is that the higher settings lower the infeed table down and away from the drum bringing it more level with the outfeed. This means less of a pivot over the blade drum but obviously more material being removed so test setting with scrap wood first.Overall, I wouldn't buy this again nor recommend it to any but the most cash-strapped diy-er (like me!). If you on't mind tinkering, it can be made usable but requires too much finessing in order to yield only average results.Hope this helps someone.

Very good for the small jobs I needed.

Cheap and cheerful, it works, not perfect, but for the price, it's a good buy.