Bridgewood planer

[FSS172]

Shopping for a used planer. Does anyone have any experience with the 15'' Bridgewood?

[ddeaton]

Never heard of one. I just trashed my 12" Dewalt and got a 15" Grizzly sprial head. Quiet and leaves a nice finish cut. I abused my Dewalt too long with white oak. It finally puked out a blade and blade holder, sheared off 3 bolts too.:eek:

[Dave Fleming]

Bridgewood is from Wilke Machinery, in Pa (?).
It is their Chiwanese brand of machinery.

[Paul Girouard]

got a 15" Grizzly sprial head. Quiet and leaves a nice finish cut.



Good choice IMO those spiral heads sure are sweet, wish I could afford one , shoulda been a engineer , then maybe I could eh :D

[Rick Starr]

Some of the Bridgewood is Chiwanese but it is all a cut above the rest of similar design. I have a Bridgewood 15" planer and it is great--much nicer and stronger than the other clones. (bigger motor, more belts, better location, etc) I also have their 8" jointer which performs very well. Solid, easy to adjust.

Best of the clones in my considerable experience.

[David G]

30+ years as a professional woodworker. More than 1/3 of that as the owner. I've never owned any Bridgewood equipment. My impression from talking to other shop owners is that they're a bit like Grizzly - or maybe half a notch above. They don't have the wide selection of Grizzly, but are similar in that some of their models are solid, and some are less than that.

One of the issues with any of the equipment coming through the Chiwanese pipeline is Quality Control. Some castings are better then others. Some wiring is better done than others - even from one machine to the next. Some machining is quite good, some godawful. Bearing quality can be a problem. Consistent quality from the mfg. can't be relied upon. The importers, in my experience, have done a so-so job of inspecting and rejecting. Some are better than others. I get the impression that Bridgewood may be slightly above average in that regard. It is getting better overall. Some of you may remember when Japanese automobiles were regarded, rightfully, as junk. Then, iffy. Then, decent. Now... some of the best in the world. In terms of machine tools, we're still in the iffy to decent range.

If you know and trust the owner of the particular planer in question, and he warrants that it's been a good one, then it's probably fine for the long haul. If not - I don't know the individual models well enough to speculate whether that planer was one of their base hits, or merely a foul ball that hit the first base coach in the kneecap (or somewhere more painful)... and I'd approach it with much caution.

It's an old adage, but I'll reiterate it here: buy the best tools you possibly afford. You won't regret it. One thing I've noticed over the years is that I do my best work on the tools I'm most familiar with. Therefore, it's important that tools last a long time, so that they become extensions of myself. They don't have to be the fanciest tools, or the tools with the most features. They just have to be solid, consistent and reliable. Conversely, the more experience I have, the more I am able to do well with crappy or makeshift tools. The process, however, is irritating and frustrating rather than joyful... and that facility comes later.

"One only needs two tools in life: WD-40 to make things go, and duct tape to make them stop" -- G. Weilacher

[oldsub86]

If you can live with a 12" planer, look for an old Parks. There seem to be lots of them around and they are heavy tough old tools. Most parts are still available as well.

Randy

[Rick Starr]

*sigh*

Well, remember that a planer is not a precise tool as much as a heavy one, and remember that all these 15" clones come from the same outfit with slight differences for different buyers. The planer design itself has been proven (had been 11 years ago when I bought mine). It is after all a copy of the original American Delta 14" model, IIRC.

Still, some variants are better than others. The Grizzly had the motor on top at the time copying the Delta. Dumb. I think they've subsequently changed that. Bridgewood's was mounted beneath. Bridgewood has 3 belts to the competition's 2, and so on. Older clones had a depth wheel mounted on a vertical axis which interfered with stock pass-over. Bridgewood put it on a 90deg gearbox which was a big improvement.

I've owned the Makita, Grizzly and Bridgewood planers, and the Bridgewood wins hands down. Sure they're imports, but the quality in the Bridgewood is the best by some distance. It is, after all, a planer, not a piano. The one time I needed to call Wilke about a BW issue, they responded instantly and, to my great surprise, for free. My experiences with a great deal of Grizzly after market issues was painful and quite costly by comparison.

And while Dave is correct that the BW 15" planer is an import, it was brought in to flesh out the Bridgewood line which was an incredibly solid line of US made wood working machinery, including such things as 6-head planer-moulders and so on--the sort of thing you'd feed rough boards into at one end and pick up feet and feet of perfect crown moulding at the other end, and so on. Sadly the global marketplace seems to have done them in.

So you have some degree of comparison, I originally fit out my shop with Grizzly, and the happiest day of my young life was when I managed to replace the last of that crap. Even the dust collector was mediocre and needed modification to work adequately. I now have a good American Delta table saw, a beauty 20" Rockwell bandsaw, a 20" x 8 1/2' General lathe and a (poor) Jet drill press. Oh, and an Oneida dust collector. These are the major machines in my workspace and they are (excepting the Jet) a very complementary outfit. I've run miles and miles of swietenia mahagoni, swietenia macrophylla, ipe, spanish cedar(cedrella odorata), sapele, jatoba, pressure-treated pine (gasp!) and so on through my planer without a single complaint.

If the unit is in good condition I think you'll be happy with it.

Good luck.

[Paul Girouard]

Rick what your knife life like when running that Jatoba ? My Foley/ Belsaw / sold under Sears name , handled the Jatoba OK , not great it's a slow feed rate planer anyway, but the cutter/ knifes (H/S steel not caribe) made it thru the couple of hundred ( multi pass's ) feet , but they did get dull rather quickly.

I have another section of Jatoba top to do same client, this run will be almost twice as much to run.

Guess it doesn't really matter , I'll just have to change knifes towards the end of the run. Carbide planer knife , if even available for my machine , are spendy, to spendy for my blood .

[ddeaton]

It's an old adage, but I'll reiterate it here: buy the best tools you possibly afford. You won't regret it. One thing I've noticed over the years is that I do my best work on the tools I'm most familiar with. Therefore, it's important that tools last a long time, so that they become extensions of myself. They don't have to be the fanciest tools, or the tools with the most features. They just have to be solid, consistent and reliable. Conversely, the more experience I have, the more I am able to do well with crappy or makeshift tools. The process, however, is irritating and frustrating rather than joyful... and that facility comes later.

"One only needs two tools in life: WD-40 to make things go, and duct tape to make them stop" -- G. Weilacher

I have been in the machine shop business since 1978 and until a few years back I would have agreed with you. You can buy a import Bridgeport lookalike today and all the parts will just about fit on an old original made in the USA. The worst thing that came from overseas was cutting tools and drill bits. Aside from the soft steel, some were not even straight. Today, how many of us buy and use the full sets of Forstner bits from over there? Have you looked at the quality of some of the import stuff lately? The only thing I gripe about is the electrics on the imports. The motors and contactors are cheap, but I have had Baldor and Marathon motors fail also.
I am one that will always buy quality over price, and in the past never would never settle on an import, but the tide has turned. The stuff is decent and no one over here is making it any more. Its sad to say.
My Grizzly planer is great, bearings from Japan, cutters from Germany, castings from far east. A friend of mine, who is a retired cabinetmaker, is selling his Powermatic 24" to buy a Grizzly 24" spiral head. He has my 15" in his shop now and wont give it back to me.:(

[Lew Barrett]

The two confusing philosophies of craftsmanship and tool ownership:

"Buy the Best Tools You can Afford"

"It's a Bad Carpenter Who Blames His Tools"

My own thought is that we'd all love to own the best, and some of us can probably even justify that based on their needs or finances. For my part, my tooling is a mix of good, really good, and passable. None of my tools however good they might be, have ever made up for my lack of skill or experience.
I expect the better craftsmen on this forum can do better with my tools just as the poorer ones wouldn't be able to do as well. I have no problem buying Chinese. For the most part, it's all I can justify.
All of the recent Powermatic, Delta and Jet stuff I have is better than I am. My tools, by and large, are not where I find my limits.

[Dave Fleming]

Paul G., TCT "tipped" knives/cutters are ACES!

Sure they will initally set you back maybe twice what HSS cutters/knives.

BUT, you will be able to run literally miles of hard abrasive wood through the machine.

When I was lead millman at MARCO in Seattle and SWIMPAL also worked there as my apprentice. At first the only planer and jointer knives were HSS.

I don't have to tell you how quickly those knives HSS, dulled milling rough Teak!

I convinced the Supervisor to get some TCT knives and, what a difference it made.

Even the yard manager who's office was underneath the millshop made the comment 'now he could make telephone calls without waiting til I was done with that days facing and planing.:D

As I mentioned to the original poster, the quality of the product coming out of those Chiwanese factories is soley dependent on the QC inspectors of the company buying the items.

Witness todays news about yet another recall of Chiwan toys with lead paint. It is gonna cost Mattel millions of dollars and millions more in bad publicity to recover from that mess!

Me if I could not afford new General of Canada wood working machinery or if you need bigger, the machinery coming from Germany or Austria, I would look for 'ol ahrn'.

Delta/Rockwell, older PM, Crescent, Newman, Northfield, Davis and Wells,

THAT's GOOD STUFF!

Or so say I.

[Bruce Hooke]

The two confusing philosophies of craftsmanship and tool ownership:

"Buy the Best Tools You can Afford"

"It's a Bad Carpenter Who Blames His Tools"

The second saying probably makes sense if you are talking about a pro, but I've heard the point made that not infrequently for amateurs it is the tool that is to blame when things don't work as well as you would like them to. Here is an example -- after using a Delta Unisaw for a few years I remember going back and using a Sears 10" tablesaw. The fence on the Sears saw would not lock properly so when I tried to rip something I ended up with an irregular cut, and that was just the problem I ran into that day; that saw had lots of other failings that would have shown up on another day with another type of cut. Yes, with care and skill you could get the Sears saw to work (if I had seen in advance what was going to happen I would have backed up the fence with a c-clamp), but I thought it was not at all unreasonable to blame the tool when the rip cut came very close to ruining the work.

So, I'd be very cautious about when you apply the "blame the tool" saying because in many cases it just leads to frustration as someone struggles to get a tool to do a job that it is just too poorly made to do well, and then blames themselves for not being skilled enough. Hell, someone with more skill would likely see that the tool is junk and heave it onto the scrap heap!

[Lew Barrett]

Bruce,
My quotes were made much in jest, and I'd agree: a tool that is poorly suited to it's function is always a bad buy. I have two table saws, a small portable I barely use, and a cabinet saw I lean on almost exclusively. The big saw is much better! What I might consider "passable" others might think is very servicable. I'd never ever advocate buying junk; and I agree with you, it's even in my post: the more experienced the worker the better the work he'll do with a given range of tools. I didn't by any stretch mean to imply that one should buy less than they can afford or justify. But, to buy the best in every category is virtually impossible for most people, even the pros. By the way, in my case, space is as much a limitation as money; and both commodities are related.
As for buying Chinese, I've been well served by my Chinese band saw and Porter Cable routers that I'm sure are made in China. I have an American made table saw, and Japanese tools as well. A mix. Believe me, I'm not advocating junk or unaware of the various challenges!