Shopsmith Forums

Doug Reid has a great video on the use of jointers. His opinion is a 4" jointer is all you need. I am sure there are lots of opinions but I am also sure he is a better woodworker than I. Watch the video.

As I promised in an earlier post, here is my experience and inspiration for jointing board wider than my 4" SS jointer:

1. You can safely joint boards more than 4 inches wide on the Shopsmith Jointer. I was comfortable doing so with a cherry board that was 8 inches wide by 2 ½ inches thick by 50 inches long. DO NOT REMOVE THE FENCE (Safety check: without it the board may go off the Jointer since you do not have much lateral control). You will have to remove the Feather Guide and any other items that stick up above the Infeed and Outfeed Tables. Use the technique that Matthias Wandel demonstrates at You Tube url

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvakUFUrOXA[/youtube]

In the case of my 8" wide board:
and
I think I did around 4 passes each direction to get a near-enough flat face to run through the SS planer. But the number of passes depends on how 'flat' your board is to begin with.

You will be left with a ridge down the middle (or one side if less than 8") but by using a 1/32 inch cut each pass it will not offset too much in the planer. If you don't like a ridge you could always take JPG's advice and go to a hand plane to 'finish' flattening that side.

2. Once one side is ‘approximately’ flat run it through the Shopsmith Planer with that side down first. Flatten the far side and then turn the board over to get rid of the step left by the jointing process.

Hope this helps your decision about the usefulness of the SS jointer.

Forrest

I know you're probably not supposed to do this but I run the board through on my 6" jointer and simply turn it around and the outside portion that didn't get jointed is now against the fence and it is run through. Yes, it is going against the grain but since I'm sanding it anyway it all seems to work out. I can't tell from his video if that's what he's doing. Am I missing something here?

putttn wrote:I know you're probably not supposed to do this but I run the board through on my 6" jointer and simply turn it around and the outside portion that didn't get jointed is now against the fence and it is run through. Yes, it is going against the grain but since I'm sanding it anyway it all seems to work out. I can't tell from his video if that's what he's doing. Am I missing something here?

Yes that is the method, but the goal is to flatten, not to finish. Finishing comes after thickness planing.