17 Replies

Try heat. Get a good propane torch and have at it. Impact wrench will also do it.
Spray with WD 40 or similar 24 hrs. before.

Madts.

Oh the evil yet beautiful Ekki ?. I have a couple of hundred board feet of it hoarded away and it is hard on the machines and me too. The last project I made with the stinky wood made me take a 6 month hiatus from my beloved woodshop. All I can say is if you sell your soul to the devil herself, you might be able to make a project with it and still have a machine or two left to continue woodworking. Best of luck to you Bro. ? Welded nuts?? The work of the evil Ekki.

Try some stuff called PB Blaster , it has the best penetrating power I’ve seen .

Bruce, I’ll pick some up today. Never used it before but I’ve heard of it.

Narinder, yes, oh yes that stuff truly is beautiful. I have a few 8 footers and a bunch of smaller cutoffs left. I’m not going to be running this stuff through the planer again. I’ll stick to milling it on the table saw, which will limit what I can do with it but I’m not doing to go through this exercise again.

Not trying to be obnoxious, but are you sure you’re turning the bolts the correct direction? That seems to sometimes be a problem on some brands.

LOL yeah. 2 out of 6 or so are stuck. The others loosened up fine. They are threaded left, I think, but I followed the instructions printed on the machine. The ones that are stuck are severely burned. I’ll try to post a picture.

Not sure of the set up you on removing the blades but if it’s like many I’ve seen they have little nuts that have to be loosened, How about using an impact screw gun?

Good news! I got the blades out without breaking anything. As it turns out the nuts that were stuck were already loosened all the way. They are actually square head bolts that go into a bar. The bar and blade fit into a slot in the spindle. I thought they were left hand screws because of the direction you turn them to loosen the bar to get the blades out. They are actually normal right hand thread. Turning them counterclockwise “loosens” them from the bar, but it also wedges the bar between the blade and the slot, holding the blade in place. I’ll take a picture to explain.

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.

I’ve never had a Rigid, but on my Delta lunchbox, not feeding was sometimes solved just by cleaning the feed roller. It also helped to wax the table (paste wax). Not sure about the carriage lock, never had one on a lunchbox.

Thanks. Just finished cleaning the rollers with alcohol. They didn’t look that dirty – just dusty – but a bunch of crap fell off while cleaning. This gives me a lot of hope! Maybe this won’t be a disaster after all. :-)

I’m glad it worked out but I’m really amazed any of them loosen up at all given what the photo looks like.

They weren’t loose but they were tightened in the wrong direction. Anyway, I gave it a good cleaning today, put in new blades and gave it a try on a 2×3 and all seems to be good. Even the rotating elevation wheel issue seems to be better, if not completely gone. Thanks everyone. This case is closed. Next I’ll share what I’m using it for (in a few weeks).

glad it all worked out for you , keep the chips flying

Glad that you got it working again!

In the future, use something like ammonia cleaner on the rollers. The alcohol is said to remove the talc in the rubber, making them hard and brittle.

That’s the advice given for feed rollers on printers.

My lunchbox finally started slipping, after the collector hose fell off and the planer loaded. Cleaning them solved the problem.

Good advice. Thanks.