When I had my first child, I finally began to understand peoples’ comments about how painful it is to try to read an instruction manual. When the manual begins with talk of decapitation and ejection during a collision, I think anyone would find it hard to focus on what feels like 8 point font after that. It might as well have been written in Spanish. Which was included. Which my husband speaks fluently. But even he was shaking his head. We quickly whipped out our phones and found a slew of instructional videos from the manufacturers themselves to “regular moms”. There was every kind of approach from the down and dirty basics to a thorough examination of the inner workings which had you removing the components piece by piece. Step by step, our fears decreased and our confidence grew as we realized our new “precious cargo” was not going to die in a blazing car all because we hadn’t been able to properly install the carseat- in fact, we were amazed at how user-friendly they had made them since the car seats my parents described using with me (after not using car seats at all initially!).
With my first big equipment purchase of the Dewalt DW735 13” planer, I felt a need to understand the machine in and out. It was comforting that the blades were tucked nicely away from wandering fingers. I spent about two hours reading the instruction manual, looking at all the parts and figuring out how to attach the dust removal system to it. The manual was similar to a car seat’s but included some new language I needed to familiarize myself with- thank you Google.
I was amazed at how user-friendly this thing was. Right out of the box, I was surprised at how simple they had made everything. Other than attaching a handle here and an out-feed table there, it was essentially ready to be plugged in to use. Lift the red switch for on, crank the lever to lift or lower the blades, send the wood through and push the red switch for off. Of course there was more to the machine than this but that it had a simple operation process. And oh look, there’s this cute little “key” when I need to take the machine apart, hidden right here in plain sight, where I won’t lose it. Other than the instruction manual, it didn’t have parts that would end up in odd places in the my garage to be lost when I needed them! While I obviously don’t have experience with other brands of planers, I was happy that this Dewalt had been recommended to me. So much so, I later purchased one of their table saws- more on that later.