Vevor 12.5 inch thickness planer! A much needed tool! #546

All right, welcome back, everybody. My name's Andrew, and you're watching the Kelly's Country Life. So today, we're gonna do something we haven't done in quite a while, and that's a tool review. So let me start off by saying I was not approached by this company to make a review for this video. Believe it or not, I approached them. So a while back, we were putting tongue-in-groove pine in the ceiling of our new home that we're building. So a lot of people are watching the channel for a barn-do, barn-dominium, pole barn house, whatever you wanna call it, build that we're doing. And we did several hundred square feet of that tongue-in-groove pine in the living room in our loft area. Now, the problem with that was a lot of this pine that I went and drove an eight-hour round trip to pick up had deep marks and stains in it. It looked like there was marks from fork trucks, from the way they stacked lumber on top of another. Quite a bit was not up to standards and ready to install. So long story short, I spent a couple of days, hours, hours, and hours with a hand sander trying to sand those boards back nice and smooth. But by far, the number one request over and over and over again that I've seen from you, the viewers, was you need a planer. You need a planer, you need to get a thickness planer, you need to do that. Well, as y'all know, heck, the house build has been taxing us financially. And I got to looking at them and I said, I'm just not so sure that I'm ready to take a leap out and spend the money for a planer. So I contacted Vivor. They're a company that's worked with us in the past. They have been awesome to work with. I explained the situation. Hey, I've got a lot of projects on the channel. Some I'm gonna explain to y'all. I could really use a thickness planer. I have a lot of viewers that are requesting that I get one. I said, would y'all be interested in sending one out and letting them try it? And as they always do, they said, absolutely. So huge shout out to them. And again, I just want y'all to know that they didn't contact me to push a product. I actually reached out to them after researching and looking around at a lot of different planers. So for starters, this is the Vivor 12 and a half inch thickness planer. And there's a couple of nice things about it. Before I even contacted the company, I was looking at everything from Harbor Freight up to the nice Dewalt models and it can get confusing quite fast. And my goodness, there is a huge difference in the price range there. So for a while, I think a lot of people thought the Harbor Freight was probably one of the best bang for your buck thickness planers, at least for kind of the home hobbyist. Well, here lately, their prices have been going up and up and up and up. Current pricing right now is $360 for their model that was just 200 and something. So they're starting to price themselves out of the game. Then you look at some of the Dewalt models, have a very good reputation. I think they start around 550 and then they have a nicer model that's somewhere around 750. It's starting to get quite expensive for a homeowner and no more than I would use a thickness planer. So I got to looking at Vivor's planers. So the 12 and a half inch model, which we're reviewing today is $287 with free shipping. And here's the kicker. There is one of the few models I've seen that actually comes with a floor stand as well. Now I will say, I wish the floor stand was a little higher, but man, it's the thought that counts. They didn't even have to include the floor stand and hardly nobody else is including that with theirs. So for 287 bucks, it's hard to beat. Now the model I got is a little bit more. It's a little over $300, but it comes with an extra set of blades. That's the only difference that I can see. And the good thing about their 12 and a half inch model is I'm seeing these blades in a lot of different places. They seem to be relatively easy to get, but it's nice that it comes with a spare set as well. So I'm about to roll the door up. It's very bright outside. It's probably going to wash the camera out, but hey, I don't want to do much more talking. We'll go over a few specs with it. Let's use it. That's what I like to do on this channel. That's a true review. We can go over specs all day long. Let's put some wood in it and let's actually test this thing out. All right, so I should have mentioned, you can use it with or without the stand. It unbolts from it relatively easy. You can bolt it straight to a tabletop. It's got fold up infeed and outfeed tables. I went ahead and put a level on them and checked them. They were slightly off from factory, but there is very easy adjustments here via some bolts and jam nuts to where you can raise and lower the infeed and outfeed tables to get it perfectly level with this center table. So I went ahead and measured the distance on the inside. It claims it's 12 and a half inches. I come up with 12 and 9 16ths of an inch. So yes, it looks like it would feed a 12 and a half inch piece of wood. Although realistically, most of us are gonna be using these kind of tabletop models like this for two by fours, two by sixes, up to 10 inch material, but it'll absolutely run 12 inch material, no problem. So believe it or not, it's relatively heavy, right at 70 pounds, but I can move it around myself. So here is the up and down knob to raise and lower it. You have a dial indicator over here that tells you your thickness that you're actually gonna remove of the material. And this will cut around a quarter of an inch up to 6.3 inches. That's the working depth there. So that covers a wide range of thickness of wood that most of us are gonna run through a thickness planer. Now on the backside back here, it already comes with a chute that you can hook up straight to a shop vac. That's a good feature to have. It also comes with a dust collector that you can put over here that will actually shoot the dust down. I'm probably just gonna leave it open just like this. Power cord stores nice and on the inside. Now, while it's gonna be just about impossible to see up in here, this does come with dual rollers. The feed roller's up front here and it's knurled and it has two cutting blades up on that center roller in the middle. All right, so I'll put a link down in the description if you're interested in this. Again, thank you Vivor for answering my call of a much needed tool here on the channel. You can go read the specs there. Let's use this thing. And let's go ahead and start with some of that one by six tongue and groove pine. I still have some left that was stained really bad that I spent all that time sanding. This is the exact wood that y'all said, hey, you should have a thickness planer. It would make this so much quicker for you. Let's find out. All right, so take a look at this piece of tongue and groove pine right here. These are the very deep marks that are in this right now that was giving me a fit. I had this on a lot of the material that I picked up. And it looks like it's where, again, I think Fort Trump marks were scraping across this. It was making this wood unusable. There's no way I would put this up in my home. So I spent a long time sanding this with some 80 grit. And then going back over at 120, took quite a while per piece of lumber. So let's see if we can run it through this as quick as everybody claims. Take just a small portion off of the top and get it looking good. All right, let's check this out. So disclaimer, my first time ever using a planer and I had to go back and adjust it down slightly. But check this out. By the way, that piece did have some poly coat on it. So that's what you're seeing here. But look, all the black is completely gone. We still have our full V-shaped groove and edge here. It barely took anything off, but it took just the right amount off. So yes, you're correct. That is 20 times quicker than it was to hand sand. Now in this particular instance, I'd probably go back over this with some 120 grit and knock it down. But that worked amazingly well. Let's run another piece through. And there's something else I wanna show you. So I can see we've got some debris built up in here. And the manual did say that if you're gonna use this piece, you really should be hooking up the vacuum. It did come with a dust shroud that throws dust down. I think that's gonna be the smarter choice. So I'm gonna put that on real quick. Four simple screws to pop this piece off. Let's see if it cleans itself out much better. By the way, since we're in here, that was quick and easy access. Here is one of our knives and all of the different adjustments that you can do to it. All right, so I'm gonna pop this shroud in. Yeah, I mean, it's wide open. This looks like this is gonna discharge the shavings a whole lot better. All right, so take a look at this piece. Brand new piece. It's also got some poly on it as well, but this is just absolutely unusable. Look at how bad this is. So I would have thrown this piece away because it's just too much work for what it is. Let's see if it's salvageable in a matter of seconds with this. So as you can see here, every bit of that black scarring material is gone. Absolutely gone. So yes, it works. So it takes old wood, makes it look new again, but ultimately this is called a thickness planer for a reason. It's to control the thickness of a piece of wood. So if I wanted to work this down to a specific size piece that I had for a project, I'm working on say down to an inch from an inch and a half, I can slowly adjust it down and work this through many times and adjust the thickness. Not to mention a thickness planer can really come in handy for a twisted piece of wood. You can actually run them through, work twist out. There's all kinds of cool things that you can do with these. All right, so a lot of people are interested in a planer like this with something that's called snipe because this has dual rollers at certain points when the board is entering and leaving, it's only touching one roller. So that can cause the board to actually lift up into the cutting blade and the last few inches, it can actually dig down and cut into it causing that snipe. So what we'll do is run this through several times. I'll go ahead and get this full poly coat off, wear it down just a little. This is kind of a long, heavy board and we'll measure the very end and a little further back and see if we see a big thickness difference. Now I'm already expecting that there will be some snipe. I think that's just hard to avoid unless you're getting into really high end models. But what you know to do in the future is always plan on cutting your last few inches of a board off and working with ultimately the middle section. So let's see. Well, sadly, my battery is dead on my caliper and so is all of the spares that I have. All right, so here's what we'll do. I'm personally not seeing any snipe, but this is typically the area right here that it should be. So I'm clamped all the way tight. We'll adjust that and we'll see. Calipers are able to slide all the way down. So it doesn't look like it really got thin. All right, so a disclaimer. Yes, that is probably way too big of a piece of wood for this. But if I'm going to recommend this thing, I want to try it out and I'm going to actually abuse it a little there. But they make claims it'll do wood this big and even bigger. I probably made 40 passes on this machine with what's now probably three and a half inch thick piece of wood that weighs, oh, I'm guessing probably 70 pounds, about as much as this machine. My back is thanking me for stopping. So this is an old piece of oak that I've had out there. You can see how thick this is. And I cut it with a chainsaw mill and I left just a little bit left here. You can see it had gashes all in it from the chainsaw teeth across the entire piece. Made a bunch of passes going slow. Didn't want to burn the rollers out or anything, letting them barely grab it. And I've got it worked down now to where it is just super smooth. So the reason I stopped was to show you the last little bit of chainsaw teeth. It did a good job of taking that out. And I'm starting to hit rot in this wood, which is kind of wet and sticky and not what you want to run through a planer. It's actually a little damp and sticking to me. So that's not a good piece of wood. It's going to firewood anyways, but I just wanted to show y'all what it will run. Not one time has it kicked out through a breaker or anything by the way, it's got a little breaker reset right here. I guess, should you bind it up? And I'm new to this. A couple of times I let it down too far and really had it grunting and working. It never kicked out on me. So you just kind of got to play this by ear. And I'm noticing about a quarter to a half a crank down. Every time you want to make a pass on the wood, it's about as much as you need to let this take a bite of. And it's throwing a ton of sawdust and chips with just a quarter to a half a turn. So that's dropping it plenty. So the other reason I grabbed that piece of wood, well, just to kind of give you all an idea of what I plan on using this for, for future projects. Can you imagine wood like that for stair treads? You know, we've got custom built stairs coming up. We have loft railing caps that I want to do out of wood, all kinds of things in mind down the road. And we have made our mind up that we are going to do all of our outdoor porches and more of that tongue and groove pine. 1300 square feet of it, as a matter of fact. So chances are, when I go pick up a lot more tongue and groove, I'm going to have a lot of it that's going to have some of those black stains and marks. And this bad boy right here is going to be able to make quick work of that for me, get the wood in tip top shape, and then I can move on to coating it and installing it. So I can see a lot of uses for this in the future. And I have talked about once the house build is done, well, we're not done. Then I want to get into custom built furniture from our bed frames to end tables, to entertainment centers, all kinds of stuff. This right here is going to help me build some furniture as well. So thank you again, Vivor, for sending this out. If y'all are interested in this, man, as long as this lasts, and I'm going to keep y'all updated, it's going to get used on the channel. How the heck can you go wrong for $287 shipped? Like I said, 318 is what this model runs for an extra set of blades that comes with it as well. Might as well get that extra set of blades, why not? I don't really see any other planters out there in this price range. So thank y'all so much for watching. Hopefully you enjoyed the little review. Y'all are the ones that requested I get a planter. Well, here it is. Thanks for the request. Keep sending your suggestions of things that you want to see me try on the channel. Catch y'all on the next video.