My Review of the Steel City 40200H 13-Inch Planer

I was looking for a good quality bench top planer for my home workshop and after doing some research I choose to go with the Steel City Tools 40200H. The company have a reputation for good quality planers and this is one of their top of the line models so my expectations were high. This is my review of my experiences.

I ordered my planer from Amazon and it arrived at my house in about a week. Unlike virtually every other planer I have seen there was no assembly required, you can take it right out of the box and start cutting. You will have to make some adjustments to get everything dialed in but this does not take all that long. Once you make the necessary adjustments the cut quality is very good and it can handle almost anything that you throw at it.

One of the first things that I noticed about the Steel City 40200H was how smooth and quiet it was. Compared to may Dewalt DW734 which makes all kinds of noise and vibrates like crazy this was nice. The best thing about the planer however is the blades. Not only do they do a nice job of cutting they are by far the easiest to change that I have ever come across. If you plane a lot of wood and need to change blades on a regular basis you will greatly appreciate this as you can change all of the blades in a matter of minutes.

I was generally pretty happy with my Steel City planer although one issue that I did encounter was that the feed speed has only one setting. This has proved to be a bit of a problem when I am working with harder woods as it feeds them too fast. The result is that there is some tear out, I have not figured out a way to solve this problem so if you are going to be doing a lot of work with hard woods this may not be the best planer option for you.

I would recommend the Steel City Tools 40200H to anybody who needs a really good bench top planer. It is one of the more expensive models out there but it is worth the money if you do a lot of wood working. It is well built and it works great. In all honesty if you need better quality cuts than you can get from this one you are going to have to upgrade to a full size planer.