Tool: Jet 708521 JWP-12DX 12 1/2 Portable Planer

FEATURES:

• 16 amp motor
• Four-post support system
• Hand wheel easily adjusts cutterhead height
• Resharpenable high-speed steel knives
• One-year limited warranty
• Accepts meat

The tool in question is a bench top planer, and the object that I would insert through the planer’s opening until it emerged shaved, or shaven, from the other end, the object that I would seek to plane, since I would not be inserting the item a planer is intended to plane, namely a piece of wood, was a frozen log of pancetta.

This frozen log of pancetta—picture a tube of Tollhouse slice n’ bakes, but made of the very best bacon—had been circling my life for over a year. It had become (the pancetta) in my mind, inedible.

Thus I would plane it in a bench top planer, parsing it into paper-thin sheets of baconia, which I might hang in my shop, for reasons I choose not to disclose.

But which planer? DeWalt, Ryobi, Makita, Jet? And why a bench top rather than a stationary planer? A stationary planer might suck so much power out of the panel box that my wife, circling a far room of the house, might be killed, or at least spectacularly, suddenly, disrobed. Which planer would produce the least snipe, i.e., the jagged gouges at the tail end of a piece of wood emerging from the planer? What about tear-out? What about dust and dust collection?

I decided, first of all, that snipe, on a piece of pancetta newly thinned in the planer, would not matter. It would look as though someone’s father had gotten at it in the night and tried to eat it, maybe broken a tooth in its marbled fat.

Next, planers are notorious for the dust they generate. Since they reduce the thickness of what is put inside of them, that reduced thickness, which in the case of wood is dust or shavings, must go somewhere, and one is especially keen to keep it first from piling up in a mound on the shop floor, and then, if it is fine enough, of circulating microscopically through the air, where one might inhale it, perilously, and be brought at last to one’s knees.

Could one inhale bacon dust? If one could eat bacon, why could one not inhale microscopic particles of it? Might there be a microscopic food fan, allowing a man to simply walk through rooms of pulverized food, inhaling the nutritious air?

I called an expert, using her home number, and we spoke for a long, long time.

Unfortunately, I cannot share the answer I received, but the answer, if such that it was, comforted me in more...