Good day all,
Our Brandt Ambition 1100 is a great machine, and the Pre-Mil is the Leitz Whispercut using 91050 diamond inserts.
We don't seem to be getting the bit life that some of our other team members here think we should be getting based on their experience with other brand Edgebanders like Holz-Her, that seemingly went YEARS without needing attention, cutting more material per day than we do.
We get about 6 months of use from a set of brand new knives before we start noticing minor chipping and higher motor load (sound), so we rotate the knives and get another 6 months out of them.
Here's our setup.
Material-- 3/4" melamine and plywood. Roughly 20 sheets per day average, mostly melamine. Occasionally we do 1.5" thick countertops but even still we only do 0.5 to 0.8mm premil takeoff.
Pre-Mil--- we only mill off a half-millimeter on our parts, even when using 1mm or 2mm band.
We seldom to plastic laminate layups through the bander, maybe a couple times per year.
We aren't seeing abnormal wear on our router tooling, so I'm not quick to blame the melamine for being too abrasive.
Does 1 year, at 20 sheets per day, sound normal to you guys for these inserts?