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Great intitially, Not designed for longevity.
I purchased this planer a couple years ago to plane rough cut pine. It worked well out of the box and continued to do so for the first year. After about 1,000bf of mainly pine the drive rollers started having trouble pulling material throught the cutterhead. I should have taken notice at this point and determined the problem, I may have been able to prevent the problems I now have. The bushings that support the rollers are very cheap and not designed for much use as there is no way to keep them adequately lubricated. As a result the bushings siezed on the shafts destroying the shafts and causing the chain drive and sprockets to break. This is going to be a fairly expensive repair so I am simply going to do minimal repairs to get by until I can purchase a better designed planer.

nice lunchbox
This is a quality lunchbox planer. If you are looking for super high quality planing work, you're a fool to buy this unit and except such performance. I use this planer to bring lumber down close to size, and then run it though a MM planer to get it to the exact thickness with near perfect results.

This is a lunchbox planer. Nothing more, nothing less. It works great at what it does and hasn't given me a problem. It actually takes a very nice thickness out per cut and leaves a pretty good edge.

If you wanted this planer as your standalone unit, you'd be very happy. Just don't expect what (apparently) some reviewers expect.....that is.... getting a finish cut left by a $2000 planer with Shelix cutterhead.

Sweet little planer.
I have been planning on creating my own custom trimwork for my house and decided to get a planer. I had my mind set on the 13" 3 knife dewalt but when I saw that the 12 1/2" dewalt now has 3 knives I saved $150 and bought this one. I was not dissapointed, right out of the box the all settings were dead on. I have run a ton of wood including oak, maple, walnut, yellowheart, purpleheart, redwood, mahogany ect. I just got my first nick in the blades but that was after 9 months of use. I would buy this planer again in a heartbeat.

Very disapointed
I ran less than 100 foot of white pine and had to turn the blades over. Two of the bolts holding the blades were tightened from the factory too tight, and stripped out. I ended up drilling and using a bolt extractor to remove the two bolts. Buyer beware..Dewalt has lost my respect as a quality tool maker.

Decent planer with disposable planer knives for occasional woodworker.
We used this planer to plane black locust that was used to build a playset for my kids. We killed once belt because of heavy duty work we were performing on it. We planed even 4"x8"x16' (black locust). Anyway not a heavy duty machine. Black locust is a tough wood though. We get 1700 feet of 4" wide black locust on sharpened planer knives (1 pass). Not bad but one side of planer knives was shot in one day so we had to turn over to use opposite side.

The only problem is that knives are disposable and expensive. Well I cannot spend 50$ almost every week for planer knives so I purchased sharpener from Woodcraft. Sharpener probably paid itself off. I wished they used some standard knives. I would buy carbide tipped planer knives.

We have dust collector hooked up to this planer. We got rid probably of 500 gallons of black locust shavings.

Overall I am pleased but cannot give 5 stars due to nonstandard disposable planer knives. It reminds me of some printer manufacturers. We give you almost a free printer but we will make up with ink. Dewalt seems to follow this logic except planer is not almost free.