I have the cast iron extension that I've used to mount the fence for
surfacing wide boards. You're right, you can do it without the fence, but I
like the safety aspect of using the fence. I only takes a couple seconds to
mount the extension.
An interesting sidelight on the extension. It has two scales on it, a metric
scale and one that looks as if it may be an inch scale, but it's not. I
don't know what it's supposed to be. If it was supposed to be an inch scale
they really screwed up. I first noticed it when I was ripping a 4 x 8 sheet
of plywood and put the extension on so I could mount the fence off the side
of the planer outfeed table. I was using the inch scale, and after sawing my
dimension was off. When I checked the scale on the extension with my tape
measure the metric scales lined up, but the inch was way off.
Larry Johnson
