Grizzly G0453P Planer

Anyone that spends enough time working with wood will end up needing a planer. After enough projects, you will start seeing the cost-saving benefits of buying your lumber rough cut right from a mill and just cleaning it up yourself. Or sometimes that board that you were sure was 3/4″ is actually 7/8″ and now you have to work that out on your own. Our shop went through several iterations of planers before landing on the G0453P. As with most people we tried the “portable” 12″ planers from Grizzly first. The first lasted 5+ years before we were using it too hard and it needed to be retired. We replaced it with the same style (12″ portable) since the first one had done so well by us. However, when that one began to show its age we realized we were running them too hard to continue as we were before. That’s when the decision was made to upgrade. The step up to a 15″ planer also would afford us a few extra options when building out some of our pieces. It doesn’t look like the polar series (white) is still available on the Grizzly website but the G0453 is pretty much the exact same planer in terms of technical and functional specifications. We’ve run thousands of board feet through it by this time and it performs flawlessly. One tip; make sure you connect it to a properly working dust collection system. Planing woods like maple without being able to properly self-clean will result in a lot of chips coming back onto the material. 

You may be tempted to immediately upgrade to the spiral cutter head for your planer. We can say that while that is an excellent and efficient option it is certainly not necessary to get clean and beautiful results. Start out with the three standard blades and you can advance later on if you think the extra money is worth it. We will say that the planer will run significantly quieter with the spiral head so if low decibels is important that might be something to consider.