High static electricity on planing
Hello all. I just wanted to pass along a “painful” discovery I made this last weekend. In order to plane some thinner material, I placed some slippery melamine on the planer bed. This was 1/4″ melamine coated on both sides with the synthetic or plastic coating (I don’t know exactly what it is). I started planing and things were going well, but I started to receive a fairly severe static electricity shock whenever I touched the planer, and this had never happened before. I tried with the dust collector on and off as I thought it was the culprit, but I still kept getting shocked. I finally decided to remove the melamine sheet and put a piece of plywood down, and the shocks were gone! Moral of the story is don’t use plastic coated wood to slide other wood across as that generates and builds up lots of static electricity! My fingers still are hurting from this, but hopefully that will go away soon. Now I can get back to my re-sawing and planing for my bent laminations!
Replies
Sounds to me like your planer bed is not grounded. I would think any properly grounded machine would funnel off that static current to the ground but I could be wrong. If it was just a bed carrying the charge is possible because of the mechanism and such it's not electrically attached to the rest of the machine but if you were touching other parts of the machine and getting shocked like that I would be a little concerned about the connection to the electrical ground and I would have it checked out out because I don't see how that static charge could build up like that, because an electrical charge is an electrical charge it doesn't matter where it comes from static or otherwise. it. Is your planer model and older model before grounded tools were required?
I thought of that, so I created an additional ground for the machine and ran it to the building ground. No go. My guess is that since I was handling the wood pieces to be planed, that I was the conduit for the charge since I got shocked when touching other metal surfaces. The plastic on the bottom of the sled piece kept the charge from reaching the planer at all. I got shocked when touching my table saw for example. This is a newer machine (4 years old) on a brand new shop area with great grounding. Removing that plastic layers on the sled made everything shock free once again.
I think that it is worth increasing the power of the current and making sure that the flow rate does not decrease in this machine
Allan,
Are you a bot? You talk bot.
Lataxe, an old-fashioned biological mechanism.
Do you recall those machines in fairground arcades that would give you an increasing electric shock after you dropped in the coin and turned a handle? We kids used to have competitions to see who could turn the handle furthest before letting go with a yelp.
The shocking planer would seem to supply such an entertainment as well as being a planer. Good value, if the shocks can be regulated with a turning handle. Reliving one's youth whilst planing wood ......
Lataxe, aged 10 & 3/4.
That sounds like a horrible machine for an arcade.
Ha - 'twas nothing compated to the laughing clown, which was a very creepy clown in a glass box that cackled horribly when the penny was put in, gurning nastily the while. Many of us small boys & girls had unpleasant dreams for years afterwards that involved this clown ......
Then there was the wurlitzer that nearly broke your neck if you were unwise enough to stick your head higher than the headrest, meant to catch the heads before centrigugal forces rived them off!
And what about the bad lads who ran the dodgems and would, now and then, increase the voltage (or was it the wattage) to make the dodgem cars go twice as fast, resulting in collisions not unlike the car crashes of real life roads.
In them olden days, fairground "accidents" were commonplace but put down to the normal risks of everyday life. (1827 I'm talking about, when I were a bairn). :-)
Lataxe
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