Optional “Silent Power” Segmented Cutterhead

Hammer is the small-shop, value-oriented wing of the Felder Group, intended to bring Austrian engineering to a broader audience. Hammer’s latest offering is the A3 series of jointer/ planers, which packs state-of-the-art convenience and industrial milling capacity into a small footprint.

I recently tried the 12-in.-wide A3 31, equipped with the optional “Silent Power” segmented ($800 extra) cutterhead with carbide teeth. It’s a fantastic upgrade. This is a true helical head, with the teeth sharpened on a curve for a shearing cut. It’s quiet, and its shearing action left negligible tearout on the most ornery woods: quartersawn white oak, figured maple, and super-hard jatoba with interlocked grain. This cutterhead is also designed for better chip ejection, which might be the reason this machine has the best dust collection I’ve seen on a jointer or planer.

It takes roughly one minute to convert the Hammer from jointing to planing or back again, time mostly spent cranking the planer bed out of the way so the dust hood can rotate. That’s not bad.

The machine is a delight to use in either mode. The tables and bed have specially machined surfaces for very smooth sliding action, and the 4-hp motor teams up with the segmented head to power easily through cuts up to 1⁄8 in. And unlike some planer-jointer combos, this one has a very heavy extruded aluminum fence, machined dead-flat and straight. I was particularly impressed by the feed system on the planer: No matter the board or the depth of cut, the machine grabbed it and fed it smoothly out the other end, with no help from me.

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