Harbor Freight Planer Review Update: 1 Year Later

about a year ago I posted a harbor freight plane a review video in which I discussed how I was mostly satisfied with the quality and the value of the machine I didn't expect the video to get a whole lot of traffic but it turns out a lot of people have this planner in their sights so quite a few people posted comments posing some fairly good questions about the planer and it seems like you guys want to see another video about how it's doing a year later so far I'm really happy with the planer but it is worth mentioning that I don't own a cabinet shop and as a matter of fact I'm not a professional woodworker to any degree I really just bought the planer for doing small tinkering projects around the house most of the stuff is CNC related but I do some custom woodworking and mostly just for myself so it's really nice to have the planer around the house for doing stuff like that so I don't have to take it somewhere else and I don't have to pay somebody to make custom things for me for me the biggest use for this planer is making custom signs in which I really need this surface to be as consistent as possible for the engravings to come out right and so that's where my bread and butter is with this planer and it works really well for that application but as YouTube is I get a lot of comments and people saying you know I would really like to see you running some hardwood through this and see how it performs and the wood that I used for making the gears for my son that was some pretty hard wood and it performed pretty well but you know I figured I would try out some oak so I went out and picked up a piece of oak as you guys requested six inches by 6 feet long 3/4 of an inch thick and that planed it down to 3/8 of an inch so I threw away 16 dollars worth of wood in the process but I figure this is for you guys you guys help me out so I'll do what you guys asked me to do sometimes and I know a lot of you guys are probably gonna be calling me cheap for complaining about throwing away 16 dollars worth of wood but let's face it if you guys are considering buying a Harbor Freight planer you're probably a little bit cheap yourself because if you're willing to spend more money you probably wouldn't be looking at this one so I'm gonna call that a regular pot and kettle type situation anyway moving on this thing actually performed really well the surface of the oak I had literally do not have a complaint about I'm not gonna call it perfect but it is very very good quality surface for the amount of money that I spent on the planer I don't think I have any right to complain about this of course like I told you guys I'm not really a woodworker so after I got done with the oak I didn't really have anything to do with it so I guess I'll start making some trinkets so I drew up a little Christmas tree in AutoCAD and I made a tool path for a contour function and decided to cut it out and did that pretty cool but it's not really useful for anything one of the questions I always get is are the blades replaceable and are they double-sided so it turns out that the blades are replaceable and they are double-sided so if you end up damaging the blades that come with it you're able to flip them around and keep using it without buying new blades and if you do need new blades you're able to pick them up from Harbor Freight I think they're in the neighborhood of 25 bucks so it's not too bad and you're gonna be able to keep the machine running for longer full disclosure I purchased this planer fully intending on a breaking within the first year of me owning it and that's why I purchased the warranty the strange garage just happens to be pretty hard on tools so the fact that it hasn't broken and I don't actually have any real complaints with it that kind of speaks to the quality of the build and granted it is definitely not a professional quality tool but for somebody like me who's just a hobbyist this thing has been tremendously helpful in just completely transforming the look of reclaimed boards and making them usable again for my application so I honestly don't have enough good things to say about it normally when I do a tool review I like to preach something I call a reasonable expectation for the amount of money that you're spending in the manufacturer you're buying from what can you reasonably expect in terms of longevity and quality so $100 Harbor Freight welder you can't really expect as much as you would get out of a $500 Miller or Lincoln with this obviously it's a little bit more expensive but it's still about half of what you get for a Dewalt planer so what can you reasonably expect in terms of lunch of any quality and the truth is is I don't have a single reasonable complaint because not only has it not broken the quality has been everything I ever needed and honestly it wasn't that expensive and the truth is is that the views that I got on that last video it paid for the planer so thank you for watching it that really benefited me most of the time my videos don't even come close to paying for the projects so I was pleasantly surprised there but if you were to spend more on a planer what would you really be getting because you can get a larger planer which you're definitely gonna be paying more for but if you've got one the same twelve and a half inches then you spend double what are you getting for an amateur you're getting basically nothing unless you happen to get one of these that's broken which is exactly why I recommend getting the extended warranty because they're gonna be able to replace the unit for you no additional cost and you're still only paying half as much a lot of people think that I'm sponsored by Harbor Freight and that is not true not even close there's the plenty of tools that I bought from them that I've chosen not to do a review on because they're garbage there's quite a few things I bought from Harbor Freight that basically ended up straight on the trash can I only review the things that I'm happy about or that I have a reasonable original thing to bring to the conversation something that some other youtuber some other poster hasn't already said so I think this is a great planner for the money and unfortunately they don't really do the 20% off coupon anymore I've seen them for fifteen percent on this planer specifically so keep an eye out for that if you're still looking for it but honestly it's worth the money regardless just get the warranty that's my number one recommendation anyway strange garage has an Instagram page now I'm starting to get the whole internet thing figured out so you can follow me as strange garage I'll go ahead and put a link in the description I'm just gonna be doing little snapshots of projects that I'm working on so you're not gonna get the long drawn-out videos that you normally get on YouTube just good little clips keep you guys entertained a little bit and anyway I hope you guys enjoyed the video thanks for watching and thanks always for doing your part to help make this world a strange place [Music]

Channel: Strange Garage

Views: 1,776,373

Keywords: bauer, harbor, freight, planer, dewalt, porter, cable, wen, grizz, ridgid, delta, review, jet

Id: 3e2FGa6kzhc

Length: 6min 13sec (373 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2019