This is our 15" thicknesser. Some heathens call it a planer but, to me, it’s a thicknesser. It makes thick wood thin.
It arrived in our lives nearly 15 years ago and, like a little puppy, it quickly began to leave little patches of fluid everywhere it went around the workshop. I tolerated this for a while (maybe 7 years?) until I found it sitting one afternoon in a puddle of its own excrement.
No joke...cleaning up gearbox oil on a sawdust covered concrete floor is not for the faint of heart or someone lacking attention to detail. Slippery shenanigans can be had.
The gearbox is the heart of this thing and is a sand cast iron heart of two halves seperated by a wafer of cardboard...ok, gasket material that looks like cardboard. The original gasket was neither robust nor effective. So I cut another one from actual gasket paper, fitted it and moved on.
It continued to weep in its inimical fashion.
Fast forward a few years and upgrade to a new shed and sure enough...little puddles of gearbox oil.
Time for more open heart surgery and the inclusion of modern chemistry...
Cue a much bigger puddle on the floor as the sump plug goes fully Ford...
A small amount of fiddling about with bolts, sockets, hex spanners and muttered complaints about early Noughties Chinese manufacturing standards when coupled with cheapskate Western purchasing guidelines and low levels of quality assurance giveashits saw the various extraneous parts disintegrated off the machine. Now I could open the box...
And the box was opened. It’s all good in there...clean and tidy.
A clean rag to mop up the last of the oil plus another one to sit the gutted box on whilst I clean it up sufficiently to go with silicon gasket goo. But that will have to wait for another time...home schooling got in the way today...
However, it is fixed. It’s no longer leaking all over the shed floor...so that has to be some sort of win, eh?