Dewalt 735 Planer Belt replacement

I don't use my DW735 planter that often but I love it when I need it.  I bought a Shelix cutter head for it a few years ago when they had it on sale for around $300, IIRC.  Not sure it was worth the upgrade but it works well enough for me.  I tried to use the planer about a week ago and it only fed the stock in a few inches before it stopped feeding, even though the motor was still running.  Looking underneath, I noticed that cutterhead was not spinning either.  I opened the top cover and removed the cover over the cutterhead to look around and noticed what looked like some melted rubber off to one side.  Closer inspection found this (I pulled it up through the gap):

The drive belt was completely shredded.  I have had the planer for at least 9 years now and I bought it used from an estate sale, though it looked like it had barely been used when I got it.  I do not think that I use it enough to wear out the belt but I suppose that after 9 years, the urethane rubber (or whatever it is) is bound to deteriorate some with time.  I opened up the side access panel to take a look and it was quite the mess in there. 

I am not sure if this happened over several uses or with one catastrophic failure.  As parts of the belt came loose, they obviously got caught in the roller drive chain which may be when it finally stopped altogether.  It took me about 15 minutes slowly turning the cutter shaft by hand to get the chain sprocket to move enough to remove all of the rubber and string.  Here is what is left of the belt:

One thing that I discovered as I was cleaning out the debris is that there is a little grate that I always just assumed was for air flow/cooling but I now think may be so that you can inspect the belt without taking the entire cover off the side.  It it has a latch instead of screws (uses a allen wrench to operate just like all of the other screws on the planer), making it easy to take off and I think it also allows you access to place the belt on the motor shaft pulley, since the surrounding cover is not as easily removed.

From now on I will open up the hatch every now and then to inspect the belt for wear or damage.   If you have never looked at your drive belt, now might be a good time to inspect it for damage.  You can remove the side cover with just 4 screws easily enough but this should be good enough for a quick check.  

I went out to all of the usual online tool parts places and found that the OEM replacement belts are $54 at most of them and also at Amazon.  I found a couple of sites that were only $40-something but with shipping, they basically came up the the same price.  There are several aftermarket versions on Amazon that are under $20 for a pair of them but all that I checked had enough bad reviews about them only lasting a few uses to make me skeptical.  It turns out that with its free shipping, Amazon is the best deal and since returns are so easy there, I decided to go with their OEM belt.  They also said that they would deliver it within 2 days, which helps with my current project.  Since it was only $14 for a pair of the best reviewed aftermarket belts on Amazon, I decided to add a pair to my shopping cart as well so I can see if they are as bad as some of the reviews claim they are.  Having a new OEM to compare side-by-side will help me know whether they are worth even trying or not.  

As an aside, I am pretty impressed with how they designed the drive mechanism.  The motor directly drives the cutterhead via the belt. The cutter head in turn drives a gear box on the other side of the planer that drives the feed rollers.  Chains and sprockets on both sides keep the rollers in sync.   Having the cutter driven by a belt provides a level of safety for the mechanism so that if you take too big of a cut, the belt will slip protecting both the motor from overloading and the cutter head.    Since the cutter head drives the gear box, the roller feed rate stays consistent with the cutter head -- if the cutter slows down because you are taking a deeper cut or the belt is just worn and slips, the rollers will slow down the feed rate accordingly.

Anyway, I thought I would post this out there for anyone who has one of these planers.  Might be time to inspect the belt!  After I get the replacement belts in hand, I will compare the OEM and aftermarket belts and also report back about how big of a pain it is to put them on.  

More to come...