re: Planer blades welded onto spindle

So there you go. Turn the bolts counter clockwise (“loosen”) to jam the bar against the blade; clockwise (“tighten”) to free the bar inside the slot. The 2 bolts that were stuck were actually all the way in the “tighten” position already, which means they were not holding the bar in the slot. That’s why I couldn’t move them – they were already screwed all the way into the bar! I guess I"m lucky the blade didn’t fly out at some point. All the other bolts were fine, the blade seemed to be in the correct position and the blade looked normal and undamaged except for some nicks in it.

Now on to the next part. I bought this planer used and this is the first time I’ve performed any kind of real maintenance on it. I would like to not completely disassemble it if possible. My issues are:

1) the rollers do not feed well. Is this normally a matter of cleaning or adjustment?

2) the carriage lock was not working well the last few times I used it and I would watch the raise/lower wheel turn as it was running – up to half a turn (1/32). I started holding the wheel, but I would prefer not to have to do that.

As always, any advise is appreciated.