I've been using this jointer for 10 years now but when i built it
I wasn't even sure if it would work.
the cutter head bearings pulley motor power cable and switcher are from a first generation
Delta lunchbox planer, but I had to buy a longer belt. What i don't have here is a rabbeting ledge
because the pulley and the bearing are bigger than the cutter head and they need to be on this side
but mostly I use a rabbeting ledge when the pieces were too wide for a jointer
but with a 12-inch jointer that's almost never the case. It's been a long time since i made
sure that it still cuts straight so let's check that. Got them clamped together here,
touching in the middle but i've got a gap right here so it cuts an edge that is slightly convex.
which means if i want to laminate those two boards together it requires a bit of clamping force here.
About this much. The gap here is about one millimeter i might as well fix that and that means
the jointer is cutting half a millimeter off on that length which means i should drop the outfeed
table by about half a millimeter here and that works out to one third of a turn on those nuts.
but if i put this long ruler on the table it's hard to tell that the tables are
out of parallel it's all a matter of tweaking things too much and the problem with using this
long 4 foot aluminum ruler is not that the ruler is not straight but it's gravity so you can
see i've got a gap here because the entry table is down a bit but if i just push down on here lightly
it touches the table basically the weight of the ruler already causes a bit of deflection in
the ruler which is getting to be on the order of magnitude of the change i'm trying to make
looking at the ruler i'm not so sure I should adjust it at all now.
it's also a matter of technique and how you use it
got those two boards clamped together now and now there's a slight gap in the middle not the ends
and once again that takes a little bit of clamping force to overcome about this much what doesn't
help is that the tables aren't completely flat. The outfeed table is pretty good but the in-feed table
sags in the middle by possibly as much as half a millimeter i can press the ruler down into it
well i think a piece of cardstock under the table right about here would fix most of it
oh i think there's the problem! Sawdust got underneath here
so maybe i don't need that shim it after all how these chips got there i have no idea
well that's as flat as i can check it
when i was originally obsessing over that jointer and about how flat the tables were
I checked my cast iron jointer and it turned out those tables weren't any flatter either
in comparison to my table saw, I put the ruler on here and you can see there's a gap right around here so
almost as much distortion as my jointer and if you have a cast iron jointer
don't check it you'll just never be happy with it again. There's a spring down here that forces this
guard closed and that unfortunately wants to undo the screw here so I have to tighten it real good
This is as far down as the infield table will go but the jointer is not strong enough to
really take off much more than that anyways certainly not across the width like that.
Now when i built it i had some paranoid fears like what if it were to throw a knife which is why I
put the guard on here and also the fence of course would prevent the knife from coming out
the other fear i had is that somehow this head would catch on to the infield table and then just
from sheer momentum it would rip the head loose it would come jumping out into my face although
that was a little bit irrational because to do that it would also have to get through the fence
push these tables way out of the way and also pull away from this belt which
would prevent it from jumping up really it wouldn't have enough energy to do that but
for part of my paranoia i made sure that this gap was substantially smaller than the cutter
head is large so that if it were to come loose it wouldn't be able to come out of this slot
not without pushing a lot of stuff out of the way and that would use up all the inertia that
it would have and with this only being a two inch diameter lunchbox planar cutter head for a 12
inch jointer it has a remarkably small gap here about three centimeters or an inch and a quarter
and that's good in terms of avoiding tear out also good if you want to cut some really small pieces
this would be even more unsafe on a regular 12-inch jointer even most six-inch jointers
when the jointer starts up this belt likes to flop around a bit but it just takes a little
bit to stabilize it so i ended up adding this piece of smooth hardwood inside the
guard here which is fairly close to the belt so it hits that initially and that stabilizes it
and you can see there isn't too much rubbing here so that's all it takes
i just noticed the motor shaft here is not entirely parallel to the belt
and this pin has moved forward but i wonder if it's become disengaged in the back
so i haven't actually locked in here in 10 years
huh i guess I left some spare shims in here when I built it
looks pretty clean inside though so what i thought might have happened is that this
pin that holds the motor would have slipped out of that hole and moved this way but it doesn't
look like it's ever come out of that hole so i think that was out of alignment all along i
reached in there with a stubby screwdriver and backed out those screws so i could move this part
and if you're wondering what this block is for that's a strain relief for the power cord
i can get in there with a drill excellent
not so much the back one
no that lines up it looks like that tiny bit of extra belt tension from that fixed the flapping
issue i guess that alignment's been wrong all these years i made the stand like this
so that be a big place to have a bin here for the chips to fall into
but eventually i decided that i really should add dust collection to this thing
with the space around the cutter head fairly tight and fairly thick in feet and outfeed
tables what happens is sometimes the chips kind of get fed back around and they get thrown out here
that's with the dust collection turned off
still happens with dust collection but a lot less because there is air flowing down through
here and into the dust bin those chips coming back up can also affect the quality of the cut if you
look on this here you can see it's a little bit scuffed in a few places because this cut i made
without dust collection whereas this cut on the other side doesn't have these little scuff things
and those scuff marks happen if a chip just happens to be on top of the knife when it
comes past so instead of cutting the chip just scuffs dust collection consists of a home air
duct fitting and elbow and then a four inch dust collection hose going to this thing here which
is a dedicated dust collector and it's actually plugged into the jointer this provides power from
the jointer when the switch is turned on and that powers this thing here which is a blower i built
at some point in the box dust collection and a box dust collector that i originally actually
built for this table saw and this blower doesn't actually suck all that hard but it only has to
suck the dust through this length of hose so it's quite adequate i really like how
the infeed adjust works on here it's just this crank here and it turns really easy and i don't
need to lock it or anything like that so i just reach down there and give it a couple of turns
sometimes if i need more or less cut takes quite a few turns to adjust it all the way down and up
and i think it's been a decade since i had a look in here so i'll open up just for the heck of it
a little bit dusty in here all the space here is just for the parallelogram adjustment there's also
the wiring here for the switch the threaded rod for the crank goes in this block and that pulls
the uh thing on the bottom here back and forth and that in turn adjusts the parallelogram mechanism
and what i like about the parallelogram mechanism it supports the infeed table but it also holds it
down so that if i get an extra bit of down force here it's not going to lift here and also even if
i lift the jointer like this i can lift the jointer by the table and it's not a problem
now i had been thinking earlier i thought that table went down a little bit further
than it did and i just noticed there's a whole lot of sawdust back there
this stuff and that has leaked out from between the table and this guard here so
i'll vacuum that out and then i'll have a little bit more adjustment again
that does go down a little bit further than it used to now
and the reason i get dust in there is of course all the dust gets thrown this way and there's
a slight gap between the infeed table and my dust deflector thing here in fact this
is the dust deflection thingy and that has a slight gap with the table here because when the
table is all the way down it touches and when i move that table up a slight gap opens there
before adding this dust collection thing here i actually had a gap here where the
sawdust could fall out which i blocked with it and that's why it ended up accumulating
this is where the cutter head is and the main sawdust falls
out i'm going to screw this thing to the bottom edge of the table
okay i just installed this part and then i had the idea of making
this part here move so there's never a gap
well this update ended up more interesting than i thought it would be but if i was building again
what would i change i would make the table longer but when i built it in the shop i had
i didn't have that much space the caster wheel sort of made sense in my last two shops because
i kept shuffling the machines around but here i really don't move it and they're just kind of
annoying because the jointer has a tendency to move on me which is why i prop this box under
the stand here so just now i made these brackets to keep that jointer from rolling around anymore
and i can still drag it around the floor to move it because it's not that heavy
and lastly i would probably use an induction motor instead of the motor
that came with a planer because that motor is just so loud so i'm going to
change it over to use this crazt big motor and that'll be an upcoming video
And I almost forgot to mention: I have a set of plans available for this jointer on my website.
Lots of people have used this set of plansto build their own 12-inch jointer.