Working to Outfit a Beautiful Vintage Chambon Machine With a Spiral Cutterhead

Chambon SAS was a French company who manufactured woodworking machines. Founded in 1937 in Cousance, a small town in the Jura region of France, the company found great success with the regions famed precision craftsmanship. Chambon would go on to produce a wide range of woodworking machines, from combination planer-jointers to bandsaws.

Chambon SAS would operate like this until 1993 when the company was acquired by the Belgian HACO group. With this acquisition Chambon was merged with another brand, guillet, to form Chambon-Guillet. For the past 30 years since then Chambon-Guillet has continued to produce modern wood-working equipment under this name, as well as making much more large industrial equipment.

A modern planer created by the new Chambon-Guillet

Now the reason we're talking about Chambon SAS specifically right now is that we've recently received a commision to create a cutterhead for the Chambon SAS 169 combination planer-jointer, pictured below.

The machine boasts a 410 millimeter (just over 16 inch) planing width, and a maximum planing height of 250 millimeters (just under 10 inches. With planing tables which span two meters long, this is quite the large machine with a lot of capabilities.

This is prime example of how installing a spiral cutterhead into an old machine can make a world of difference compared to buying an entirely brand new machine. With a new Sheartak cutterhead mounted with 102 carbide inserts on six spirals, this old machine will be cutting as well as any new machine, and maintain its vintage charm.