# Steel City Tool Works 40100



## mimeda (Jan 25, 2014)

Hello everybody. This is my first post on this forum. 
Since I am only a hobbyst woodworker I was looking for something in the range of $250-350, either new or used (no luck at CL for 3-4 months), options including PC, Ridgid, DeWalt and this one. After doing some research online at several woodworking sites I purchased this planer from Amazon in September 2013 for about $300 included shipping which seem to be reasonable at the time.
It arrived in 2 days and quite well packed as seen below:


After removing styrofoam and packing bag was able to lift it to my workbench for inspection. To be honest, it looks a lot like many other models in the market. The depth indicator in the front is a nice and very handy feature:



It includes a hex key to change the blades and also some sort of tool to facilitate holding the blades when being changed:



One of the main features that attracted me to this one is the dust collection port included which could fit a 2.5 or 4 inch dust collection tube. I have to say it easily bogs down my shop vac and better fitted with a real dust collector but I guess most of this planers suffer form this problem?





I forgot to mention I live in North Central Wisconsin so most of the wood available to work is red oak, white oak and soft/hard maple at quite reasonable prices. I usually buy from small local sawmills so I have used this planer quite a bit on the past few months. So far no blade changes required, accurate thickness thru out and with a bit of care no snipe at all.



For the type and amount of work I do I believe it is a good tool. 

Features I don't like: Small in feed/out feed tables, easy to adjust though. Will likely need to make some extensions or replacing them if planning very long boards.
No pre-set depths for repetitive work such as in the Ridgid or DeWalt, but not big deal overall.

Happy to answer any questions and all feedback is welcomed.


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