General International 15" Helical Head Planer

[DanMc]

I recently picked up this 15" General International planer with a weird-looking helical head.  Has anybody seen this kind of cutting system before?  

This machine is quite a mystery to me.  It wouldn't run, so the guy let me have it for $400.  Digging into it, I can't tell that the planer itself has been run more than a few minutes.  No scratches or marks from chips, and the cutters are flawless.  But the motor had a fried start cap - and no wonder, the start cap has a 120 volt working voltage for a 3 hp motor wired for 220.  Maybe the start cap started it up a few times and then finally blew up.

[Old Greenhorn]

You pretty much stole that one! The head is worth what you paid, easily! How wide?

[DanMc]

15" width.  I pulled out one of the cutters and can see that there's an alignment process for setting these things, unlike the more common spiral heads with little square inserts.

Any information on this will be helpful if anybody knows about it.

[DanMc]

I hunted down some info on this cutterhead.  

https://canadianwoodworking.com/tools/introduction-to-helical-cutter-heads/

It's called a Magnum cutter head.  The above article says that there is no alignment needed since the little pins in the gib create the necessary alignment.  That makes me happy - I was terrified of the thought of aligning each one of these cutters individually with some kind of jig.  

[DanMc]

....and.... General International seems to be still operating, but they don't list this machine on their website:

https://gipowerproducts.com/our-products/

[Larry]

Dan, General went belly up several years ago. General International was their import side of the house and also closed. I'm not sure, but I don't think this new General International has ties to the machines of the past.

On the good side your planer appears to be one of the generic 15" machines that everybody imports and put there color of paint on. I have one that came with a Byrd Shelix head. I swapped the 3 hp for 5 hp and its ran thousands of foot without trouble.

[SwampDonkey]

I have a General drill press. I'm sure it went out of business soon after I got the machine. You may even get a head from Sheartak.com in Canada as well.

[SwampDonkey]

I have an old TradeMaster planer, that I thought I could never get a new motor for. I found an outfit in Ontario that provided the exact replacement motors, this was 12-15 years ago now. A local shop said they could get the motor, and kept putting me off. I found out for myself and cut any ties to that shop for ever after. 

[teakwood]

That's one heck of a cutter head. worth at least twice what you paid for the machine. 3hp isn't enough for 15".  i had a 20" jet planer with 5hp and it worked ok but was underpowered. now i have a 25" grizzly extreme with 15hp and that is a lot of hp, works very good.