Ever since I built a large homemade band saw.
I ended up milling a lot of my own lumber.
But, the problem with that is
quite often the lumber is wider than I can plane on my 6 inch jointer.
So, the solution to that problem is to get a wider jointer.
And, so I built myself a 12 inch jointer
using parts from a small planer.
So, let's plane this one through.
So, the tables for this jointer are made with
two 3/4 inch pieces of birch plywood laminated together.
And that plywood is excellent in terms of staying flat.
And then on top of that I have a piece of 11 gauge sheet metal
that's about 3.36 millimeters thick.
And that provides a smooth
wear-proof surface so that I don't end up wearing through the varnish
of the tabletop. So the flatness is provided by the plywood.
And the hard surface is by the sheet metal.
And, looking here at the cutter head, the sheet metal comes very close
to the cutter head. And it actually overhangs the plywood.
So, that gives me the final edge to get very close to here.
The entry table of the jointer needs to be
easily adjusted up and down for how much I'm gonna take off.
And this jointer here actually uses a parallelogram mechanism
so we have a link here and a link here.
And these come down internally to a crank mechanism.
So, I've got my crank here.
Which allows me to crank the table up and down.
Although it only goes up and down by a few millimeters
because this jointer doesn't have a rounding ledge.
And really you never want to take off more than 2 millimeters.
Especially with this being a relatively light weight jointer.
I don't have a parallelogram adjustment mechanism on the other feed table
because I almost never set that.
And, I also want to be able to adjust
not just the height of it but the angle of it
to make sure I can set the 2 tables exactly parallel.
Especially if I might get some warpage in the wood so
the outfeed table can be adjusted to each corner individually.
And I've got two nuts on this screw step that comes out here.
And so I can move the table
on each corner by just adjusting these nuts.
And that way I can make sure that everything is nice and parallel.
It's awkward but I don't anticipate having to adjust the outfeed table very often.
The guard is just a piece of plywood that swings over here.
And, it pivots on a big bolt here.
And this spring and this sort of a little pulley here
is what closes the guard again after the piece of wood.
So, the guard up here. I find sometimes, I actually want to see the cut.
But, with quite this wide a cutter head
I don't necessarily want the guard open entirely
so what I've got here is a series of holes so if I wanna
see my cut. And I want to block the guard from closing all the way.
I just put a screwdriver in one of these holes.
And I can lock how far it stays open
so that I still have a little bit of cutter exposed so I can see
how much I'm actually taking off.
I find the shavings dust chute on my 6 inch jointer
plugs up quite often out here. And even if it doesn't plug in
it takes no time at all for the pile of shavings to get up to here.
And back into the chute. So, that's kind of annoying.
So, on my own homemade jointer
The shavings fall straight out of the bottom in here.
And there's huge amounts of space here so I can
have a huge pile of shavings there before it starts backing up into itself.
Or the other thing I can do is to put a bin down here
so that I can catch all the shavings coming straight out of the jointer.
And, so it doesn't make a mess.
So, the cutter head is powered by the original brush motor
that my cheap little planer came with.
I had to get a longer belt. Because I have to get that motor out of the way
so that the shavings could drop straight down here.
And this pulley, unfortunately is larger than the cutter had
That's the pulley that came from the original jointer.
Which means I can't have a rounding ledge on this side.
I could potentially put a rounding ledge on the other side.
But, so far I haven't had a need for that.
So, here's the homemade jointer on the inside.
Underneath the infeed table I've got this parallelogram mechanism
with these two sets of linkages here.
And both of those are controlled down here
with a threaded rod that's attached to a crank.
So I could crank that table up and down.
Now the table moves actually in a bit of an arc.
Which is the same radius as the cutter head.
So that the lip of the table kind of follows the curvature
of this cutter head as it goes up and down and it always stays very close to it.
The cutter head is mounted on the bearings that it came with.
In fact, they were pressed on. I never removed them.
And I made these bearing mounts.
Here and here and both of these are attached with 4 really long
screws that go deep into the frame.
So that hopefully, that will never, ever come loose.
And these bearing flanges fit really tightly onto the bearings so
that holds it nice and rigid.
And below the cutter head we've got a dust chute.
So that shavings can drop down vertically.
Because on my other jointer they kind of have to go out on an angle
and it often jams up.
The cutter head is driven by a pulley on the
left side. Which is rather unfortunate.
But basically there's only a way to attach the pulley on the left side
on the cutter head. When it was in the planer this pulley was on the right side.
But the cutter head was cutting on the bottom.
So, to make the cutter head cut on top
and still go this way. I had to flip it like this.
And that unfortunately puts the pulley on this side.
And all small thickness planers
have, basically the pulley on the right side in the planer.
Which means they end up on here if you build a jointer out of it.
I got a longer belt. This is about twice the length of the belt in the
original planer. But, I'm using the original motor.
Which is in here. And that motor pivots on the shaft.
This shaft here. Which is exactly how it was mounted in the planer.
And I've got a thing here where if I tighten this screw on there
that locks the belt tensioning in place.
The motor sucks cooling air in the front and it blows it out the back.
And I put some baffles here and here.
Which hopefully cut down on the air flow so that the air that gets blown into here
has to exit through these holes here.
And the air gets sucked in under here.
And now when the dust cover goes on here.
But that dust cover is open on the bottom.
So, basically the motor is gonna suck air from
below. And hopefully that won't suck in any shavings.
And that cover also is protection for the belt and the pulley.
It's open on the top because the
guard for the cutter head has to come very close to this.
Because that pulley's actually larger than the cutter head.
But, that's not really covered by the guard already anyways.
And finally for the electrical I'm using the original power cord
that the planer came with.
And it's wired together here. And this wire here
goes back here to the switch. Which is the original switch the planer came with.
I put that on the infeed side because one's always operating the planer
from the infeed side. So, the switch had to go on here.
So, building my own 12 inch jointer is definitely one of my crazier projects.
But it does a decent job. My main complaint really
is that it's awfully loud on account of the motor that I'm using.
But, it's fairly portable for a 12 inch jointer.
It's still a manageable two person lift so
it's not too, too bad even though it weighs about 150 pounds.
So, just imagine trying doing that with a cast iron 12 inch jointer.