Delta 22-590: Benchtop Planer

About a month ago, I posted about new tools coming from Delta (read it here). The machines released at that time were a new 18″ laser drill press, 20″ scroll saw and a new benchtop planer. Popular Woodworking Magazine has all three of these in house and I’m working through the set one by one. Today we take a look at the planer.

The 22-590 planer is a single speed machine , I never really saw the need for two speeds in these tools. The planer uses a three-knife setup and handles a maximum thickness of 6″ and a maximum width of 13″. According to the company, the knives “have been re-engineered to provide three times more blade life.” Delta’s Bill Harmon says, “We basically enhanced the processing of the blade. The vacuum heat treat process (used) allows for consistent tempering throughout the processing cycle. This continuous heat throughout the process keeps the steel from cooling, thereby keeping it from getting any soft spots which inherently cause premature wear.”

The knives are dual-sided (you get a free change the first time) and are very easy to change. Each knife has a series of three small holes used to register the knives to the cutterhead , actually two of the holes register the blade to the head while the third aligns the hold-down bar. Each hole is slotted so you can fine-tune the knife to gain longer life. If nicked, slide one of the knives to the opposite end of the slot. Because the nicked areas do not align, each knife removes any small defects leaving a smoother surface. Replacement knives (Delta number – 5140055-50) come in sets of three with a suggested retail price of $26 per set.

I worked the Delta 22-590 13″ planer while milling material for drawers on a piece I’m building. That way I could plane both hardwood (cherry drawer fronts) and softwood (pine for the secondary wood) to see how the machine handles both. All materials came through with a great surface finish. When I held the pieces up to sunlight, I discovered a smooth finish with only the smallest amount of snipe on the leading edge of the pine boards; the cherry pieces were dead smooth. The smooth cut may be due to the longer infeed and outfeed tables of the planer and the fact that the tables were perfectly set up when the machine arrived (most snipe adjustment for benchtop planers is made via table settings), or it could be a result of the blades hitting the surface at the optimal angle. The company says it enhanced the geometry of the blades. “We tried multiple different cutting angles and found the sweet spot for optimal cut performance and knife wear,” says Harman.

The machine is a four-post design with a lockable cutterhead. Another notable feature is the micro-adjust depth stop. To push the planer through its paces, I worked the stop hard to see if it held and if any return to that thickness would match up. It did. The depth stop is easy to use. The one ding I have about it (as woodworkers we always want more) is that the depth stop works up to and including 1 1/4″. In the shop, adjustments up to 2″ in thickness would be beneficial.

The 22-590 planer hit store last month (July 2010) with a suggested retail price of $529.

– Glen D. Huey