So my planer has been acting up lately, failing to start and losing power. After doing some evaluation and consulting folks on the internet and the company that made it (DeWalt) I determined that the probable issue was the brushes on the motor. This would be the first thing to replace and see if the machine would run again. If not, then I would need to delve deeper.
So this morning I was all set to start taking the motor out and knock it apart in order to get at the motor brushes. Before I did, I actually consulted the manual for the planer, and low and behold, they actually had a section on replacing the brushes.
It turns out some designer for the tool realized that the brushes would probably be a point of failure for the tool, and designed a simple way to remove them. I had to take off two access panels (each with one screw) and two small plastic nuts which held the brushes in. With that, I could pull out the bad brushes and replace them with new ones (which I had ordered previously). They even had shipped me extra plastic nuts, in case I lost one (which I did).
So thanks to that engineer who designed the tool for ease of fixing. Because of him, what I thought was going to be a full day of work ended up taking me 15 minutes. Fired it back up and its working great! Took the opportunity to replace the old planer blades with new ones as well. Runs almost like new!
Kevin