Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My only two complaints are 1) the knives don't seem to last very long and replacements are farily expensive for how long they last. I ran about25 feed of soft maple through the planer and it looked great, but then I started seeing little ridges on the boards. I took the blades out and looked at them to see if they are chipped, but they looked fine. Reinstalled them and tried again, same results. I turned the blades over (they are two sided which is nice) and every thing looked great again. This time I was very careful to make sure there wasn't anything on the wood that could cause a problem, but again after 20-30 feet fo board, the little ridges started showing up again. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to afford new blades every 30 feet of boards. 2) The output chute is slightly undersized for the 2 1/2 inch hose on my shop vac. The manual doesn't recommend using a shop vac because it fills up so fast, but that's all I have and I'd rather empty it more often than have chips all over the floor. I ended up breaking one of my hoses and jaming it into the output chute and it worked fine, but it would have been better if it had just fit right from the beginning. Not too big of a deal because I don't use the planer that much and I'm planning to upgrade to a dust collection system soon. By the way, changing the blades is as simple as it could be. Everything is accessable and the supplied tool even has a magnet in the handle to pick up the blade so you don't get cut. Nice touch.