MacAllister Electric Planer Review

-

I damaged my old electric planer when trying to change the blades. I would have read the manual, but I'd lost it. A quick trawl of the interwebz showed cheap and tacky planers (like my old one) at about £25-£30, a few around £50 and big name brands from £150 and up. I'm not one for buying professional-quality stuff, and I don't have a favoured brand that I would always buy. And let's face it, even well-known brands can produce the occasional lemon.

One planer that caught my eye was the MacAllister one - MSHP900 3MM PLANER 230-240V. Like all of their tools, it has a pleasing light grey and black colour scheme - a bit like a Star Wars Storm Trooper - with sky blue highlights. It promised to be able to cut up to 3mm at a time, unlike most of the others which can only do 2mm. But I think what sold it to me, as a left-hander, was the ability to fit the dust bag on either the left- or right-hand side.

It was £50 from Screwfix. It was a new product, so there were no customer reviews on their website (there are some now, all very positive), but I trust Screwfix to not sell stuff that they know is unacceptable. By the way, it turns out MacAllister is a kind of house brand of the Kingfisher Group which owns both Screwfix and B & Q, so the products are available through those outlets as well as online.

I tried planing some wood, but nothing was taken off until I set it 1mm, so I think it maybe wasn't set up accurately in the factory. The machine has a depth stop that you can use in conjunction with the fence to cut rebates. I was keen to try that, but my left-handedness got in the way. I really couldn't push the plane and keep the fence in contact with the edge of the timber. No worries, I thought, I can just switch the fence and depth stop to the other sides. Well no, you can't. Despite the neutral-handedness implied by the bi-directional dust outlet, they didn't carry it through to these accessories. I don't know if any other planers do have fences and depth stops that can be fitted to either side of the machine - I would certainly consider it if I found one.

To sum up, it's a good planer - solid and well-built. Just don't expect to be able to use the fence if you're left-handed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Evolution R255+ Sliding Mitre Saw | Unboxing, Assembly, First Use, Review

-
Image
Evolution R255+ Sliding Mitre Saw Having bought and reviewed the  Evolution Rage 3S  about a year ago, it's now time to have a look at its big brother, the Evolution R255+ Sliding Mitre Saw. Full disclosure: Evolution Power Tools sent me this to review, and I have received no payment. I've seen the basic model on sale for about £150-£170. The Plus model, which I reviewed, is about £20-£30 more. The first thing you notice as you open the box and decant the contents, is its size. It's ENORMOUS! There's a single-sheet assembly diagram, accompanied by a small booklet of detailed instructions. Both these items use line drawings rather than photographs, and they are extremely clear. Assembly is quite straightforward, but I did make the error of inserting the slide rail unit upside down and it wasn't until I'd fitted the machine head and tried to fit the slide rail cover that I realised. So I had to do a bit of disassembly. Get the handle the right way up ...
Read more

I'm Back!

-
Image
 I'm back - well, actually, I never went away but you could be forgiven for thinking I had. My last entry on this blog was almost 2 years ago and basically it was telling you that the YouTube channel was becoming a vlog - a weekly summary of what I'd been up to and things that had caught my eye in the previous week. I did that for about a year but never produced anything on the blog to go along with it - the videos alone were taking far too long to edit and there was no time or inclination left for me to produce write-ups too. So I stopped the vlog in May 2022 - it wasn't really a conscious decision, it just kind of happened. But lately I've been thinking about rebooting it, mainly because I've spent the last month or two learning Blender and I wanted to create a lasting record of the things I've learnt. If you don't know what Blender is, it's a brilliant piece of Open Source software for creating 3D models and animations. It does CGI, basically. It isn...
Read more