Woodmaster 718

[woodman1876]

What is everyone's thoughts of the woodmaster 718? I've heard a lot both ways for and against the machine. How is it for a small business making mouldings and flooring.  I've talked to guys who say you will want to pull your hair out it takes so long. Flooring is not worth it I've been told. I'm sure everyone's idea on money is different and times money.(not sure everyone's goal how much to make per hour) I wouldn't want to spend 15k for a better machine to find out this is a bad idea. How accurate is the woodmaster? I'm sure just a 1/32 on flooring would make a huge deal. I want to make sure what ever product I make is consistent with one another.  How long does it take to mill things on average? with planning and changing the head out to moulding knives.
thanks

[sawwood]

Woodman I have the 718 and have it for some time with no trouble. I know a guy that has the 718 with the
3 sided attachment for flooring and if you have the wood all ready to go you can run a lot of flooring. You
will be working back and forth a lot so if you have a helper it goes real quick. I have the spiral head cutter
and would recommend it highly. I have made some moldings and it doesn't take long to change over from
planer head to molder. I also have the sanding drum and use it a lot when making cabinet doors. You can
use the saw blades to gang saw and if set up right you can straight line your lumber. Post me a pm and I
can give you my phone number.

Sawwood

[ncsawyer]

I have a 718 woodmaster, but only use it for planing so I can't speak to a lot of the questions you have.

Mine has been a reliable machine and works well for planing.  I actually bought mine used...it was still on the shipping pallet and had never been removed.  It was under a cover in a guy's shop.  He said he had only used it to plane a few boards.

[pineywoods]

I have a 718 that I have used for several years. It's NOT a molder, but you can make flooring with it if you have the optional router mounted on the outfeed table. Making flooring requires 2 passes. Optional to have 2 routers mounted, but the second one doesn't buy you much production wise. Accuracy is highly dependent on using accurately dimensioned feed stock. I don't have the router option, I have a shaper I use for that. I do have all the other options and have made a bunch of crown molding, baseboards, window and door facings etc. Easy to mount 2 molding heads with different cutters. I'm quite happy with the machine, but it ain't a molder..

[jdtuttle]

I also have the 718. I bought it to make molding & use for planing. It was slow for molding so I now use it for skip planing & gang saw to size lumber for the logosol ph260 . I've been happy with the performance of the 718 for a small shop.

[uler3161]

We've got the 718 and pretty much all the goodies for it. I realize I have a lot of bad items, but this is an honest review based on about 6 years of ownership. We don't run it full time. Maybe a few days a month. It's a decent machine, though it could use a few changes.

The Good:

I think the price is decent

With all the options it does a lot of operations

Our main reason for getting this was the full large-sized log cabin knives and they work great. We're very impressed with this.

The Bad:

You'll want to upgrade the feed motor. It is too slow, but more importantly the design has some flaws that cause failure. There are inserts on each side of the motor for the brushes to slide into. They will loosen up and can slide into the commutator. I also had some issue (perhaps related) that caused me to have to jiggle one of the brushes around to get the motor going again. It seemed like it was just wanting to run off one brush too. We've since upgraded to a different motor and have had no problems. I can get the specs on what motor I used if anyone is interested. I had to drill new mounting holes and move the main planer motor over, but it wasn't that big of a deal.

We use the poly board for everything because it's a lot better for feeding. It is now shaped like a banana. We bought a thicker piece of poly material with the intention of building a stronger board.

The feed roller bushings have a flat bottom hole cut into them for a spring used for down pressure. This hole is very close to the inside of the bushing and will eventually eat through. I believe the instruction manual suggests putting oil into this hole, but we didn't. I suspect it wouldn't help that much. I believe we've went through two factory bushings so far. My fix was to order thicker wall oilite bushing material and cut a new one on my milling machine.

Also on feed rollers, if you are running narrow stock you run the risk of breaking feed rollers in half. We've broken one or two. I suspect it's best to run narrow stock on one side or the other and not down the middle. As I recall, this only happened on the infeed roller. That's probably because it's at the same height as the outfeed, but has to deal with the thicker incoming material which puts more stress on it. We bought the serrated steel roller for infeed and haven't had any problems. It's much beefier, but will leave marks, so I recommend only using that for planing and the standard rubber roller for moulding.

The moulding system is made of of two Milwaukee routers along with moulding bits you run in the machine itself. I'm not fond of the Milwaukee routers. I've had bits come loose a couple times (I'm a pretty strong guy, so I don't think it was because I didn't get them tight). The more irritating thing is that these routers do not have sealed switches. Any amount of dust will cause the switches to fail. We ended up just leaving the switches on and unplugging the routers. And if I recall we actually had one fail while running a piece of moulding. I've already contacted Milwaukee, but they don't have a solution.