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Jointer


Chet

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Submitted on the old forum by Jamie

Found this one today, what do you guys think?


www.blackhawkmachinerysales.com/machinery1/b1307 

Follow up posts

1) Looks solid and clean! Older Delta probably with straight knives. Assuming it runs well, it's only shortcoming is the short beds. Also consider, for that price point you could be in a new Rigid.

I went and had a look for the 6" PM that I had with the long beds.. $1199.00 with straight knives..

2) Reached out to them and it is sold or they dont update their website very often.  

Id like to keep it under 1k for now. Can still limp mine along to buy me some time I think (fingers crossed) It will still edge joint fairly easily but face jointing is a different story.

3) As you search around, keep in mind that Delta has issues with keeping replacement parts in stock.

4) Plan b?

minneapolis.craigslist.org/dak/tls/d/cannon-falls-delta-long-bed-jointer/7028759058.html 

Thoughts?

5) Entry level jointer that you'll probably get your money out of when you upgrade.  Those short beds will drive you nuts.

6) It’s pretty similar to what I have now. I think I’m gonna wait. Plus it’s 3 hours from home

7) There was an 8" for $750 a couple adds down. Maybe he would let it go for $500-600. It looked like an older machine, but I would rather have 8".

8 ) You have so much better options on Craigslist than I do. I’ve never found anything in my area. Most of it is garbage and hardly any woodworking tools.

9) Wow how did I miss that one?! I look everyday! That one is also 3-4 hours away but might be worth checking out!

10) I have a pretty wide search area. Most of it is not the best of stuff. Almost anything that it decent is a few hour drive. 

11) Gosh with grizzly 10% off today I’m tempted to order a 6in can get it all said and done for $652.50

12) I would go for 8", I don't know what the price difference is however. Did you reach out to the 8" I mentioned from Craigslist?

13) I did reach out to them with no response.  I ended up passing on the 6 after talking with the wife about it.  Mentioned how it would work for the short term but ultimately would upgrade it.  Have her on board with waiting and saving a little cash up to get the 12" combo unit.  I know the 12 planner isnt that great but hey it is a 12 jointer.  But who knows, will prob change my mind 7 times till then!

14) In the end this is probably going to be the best option.  The wife being onboard already is the cherry on top! 

15) This lack of an acceptable jointer in my shop is driving me nuts. Getting closer to pulling the trigger one one. Am thinking an 8” will do the trick. Am leaning towards grizzly just because of the price point. 
www.grizzly.com/products/Grizzly-8-x-76-Jointer-with-Parallelogram-Beds-and-Spiral-Cutterhead/G0490X 
This is the one I’m leaning towards. Am thinking this route over the combo machine, at the price of the combo can basically get an 8” jointer and a 15” planer.

16) I have the Grizz 6” with straight blades and really like it except, it’s a 6”. I’m working on a project, for the third time where I’m buying 7 3/4” boards, only to cut them in half, jointing them and glueing them back together. By the same token, these same projects require 11” wide boards so, where do you draw the line. Anyway, we’ll pleased with the Grizz.

17) I looked at that jointer a couple of years ago but at that time they where heavily back ordered for 6 - 9 months and I didn't want to wait so I ended up going with the 8" Powermatic with straight knives.

The jointer I had before was Grizzly and I had it for over 20 years and still running great when I gave it away

18) Do you guys think the spiral head is worth the $500?

19) If you do a lot with figured wood then yes. But the way I chose to handle it so as to keep the initial cost down, I bought my 8 inch with straight knives and when they need to be sharpened, I will instead get the spiral head at that time and install it.

20) Depends on a few things..
 
1.  Do you work with a lot of figured wood?  If you do then, it's worth it.
2.  Do you often take off large chunks?  Like milling 8/4 into 6/4..  If you do then, the HH isn't worth it.

21) That is an option that I was thinking as well. Since I don’t feel like I could sharpen the knives myself. I’m thinking with the limited use that it will see that the hh is better for production shops. I don’t do a lot of highly figured woods yet. Really haven’t had tooling capable of handling them. I like the hh for the reason that all you have to do is turn the cutters for a new edge.  I’m guessing I could go a couple of years before I would have to do that. Then again with the straight knives could always buy new ones fairly reasonably as well. Idk just can never make up my mind! Ask my wife, dated her for 9 years before putting the ring on

22) I will say that my preference (I've had both) is the HH.  It's quieter (by a bunch), works with figured woods, and will get lumber thinner although not in as big of chunks.

That said, my last one was straight knives and I loved that jointer.  And, for the record, never sharpened or replaced the blades.

23) How long did you have that jointer Kev?

24) I don't recall exactly..  Probably around 6 years..  The blades were due for sharpening when I sold the machine.

25) Deulen Sharpening makes a jig to sharpen most knives and it works great.

26) Looked at a new pm 6” jointer today at acme tools. Boy was I not impressed. The tables were very nicely machined and the fence felt nice and secure but the adjustment on it was horrible. Grabbed the depth adjustment lever and my lord had to really tug on it to get the table to move. There was a jet right beside it, dang near identical other than the depth adjustment. The jet turn style was silky smooth and cost about 100 less than the pm that was on sale. 

Just a little disappointed seeing that from pm. Maybe Kev is onto something

27) That's kinda funny since they are owned by the same company.

28) Yeah, if you’re a guy with a significant female other, you know that pm stands for other things than PowerMatic and according to Kev, both are closely related.  :)

29) Literally made me bust out laughing! 

30) I did order a jointer. Have been struggling with the used market. I’m guessing it will turn around once the weather changes and people start cleaning out garages and basements. I couldn’t wait any longer tho. Ordered a ridgid was hard to beat for the money and will be an easy sell if I choose to upgrade. Should have it by the 25th. Posted mine for sale and have a guy coming to look at it this weekend.

31) Let me know how you like the rigid jointer. I have their table saw an have had no complaints for what I use it for

32) Well I said goodbye to an old friend today. Sold the craftsman jointer for a cool $125 not bad only beat me down $25. Now I’m without a jointer for a week or two. It did seem like it was going to a good home. C8C9A89B-8028-44BF-B572-D959990FCA98.jpeg

33) I think both of you got a good deal.

34) look what showed up! 
2B456CEF-89FE-42E4-8C61-7A902AC78036.jpeg

Was surprised that it was actually at the house today when I got there. The tracking on it was showing March 5th. I guess I picked a good day to leave work a little early. I went in around 4am so leaving at 2 was still a good day. Got the jointer put together in about a hour and a half which I didn’t think was to bad, guys on YouTube were saying 3 hours. A7D6E063-59F7-4215-B970-8F4744F96ECB.jpeg

Didn’t have much trouble putting it together, instructions were clear and just have to say thank god I got a little set of ratchet wrenches for Christmas. A few tight spots that they made a world of difference.

 D1F432A4-56C3-4D1B-9864-7030706D78C7.jpeg 

Tried it out without doing any serious alignment checks. Had to square up the fence is all. Outfeed bed was in perfect alignment with the knives, ran a couple boards over it, checked the joint and was perfect. Ran some door parts over it with some pretty good usage time and only complaint is about the guy who assembled it didn’t get the leveling feet tight and the jointer took on a Little Rock by time I was done. 

will give more feed back as time goes on, first impression is pretty positive. 

35) That looks like it should serve you well.

36) Nice! Enjoy and be sure to drop us a review!

 

"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not;  remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for." - Epicurus

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  • 10 months later...

Well I said goodbye to the ridgid jointer over the weekend. Did take a little bit of a bath on it but feel like it was worth it for the upgrade I found. I ended up getting a 8” Rockwell delta. Pics to come soon. 
 

A quick little review of the jointer......

Pros:

Easy to assemble and ran true out of the box

Fence was easy to adjust and only came out of square when you moved the angle 

Quiet machine with minimal vibration never ran out of power

Easy to read depth of cut with smooth adjustment 

 

Cons:

The adjustable feet wouldn’t stay tight. Would get a little wobble after time. Could be easily solved by building a base out of 2x material 

Adjustment on the knives was a little tricky, the set screw that the knife rested on had to course of thread to fine tune

 

All in all was a great machine and a pleasure to use. Would buy it again without hesitation. 

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B362F997-1F94-4DF9-9807-7340CD082BC0.thumb.jpeg.5cef3fc5e9edb6fd3ec38f9074855a0b.jpeg

Got the jointer home! 
 

Didn’t need much clean up. Did have a little vibration that I wasn’t fond of. It came wired at 110v and the guy I got it from said at times it would trip a 20amp breaker for him. It ended up doing that for me as well. I have a neighbor buddy well a couple of them that are electricians, one does residential and the other works maintenance at John Deere. We were doing a flooring project for the residential election and had some time to allow glue to tack up so they came over to check it out. 
 

They talked me into switching it to 220v and we tore into it. Another neighbor had some heavy wire laying in his garage that was salvaged, I for some reason had some plug ins and they had the know how. Got it rewired pretty quickly and fired it back up. Still had a shake than none of us were happy about. Did some digging and tightened everything up, motor mount was pretty loose. At this point I I had already replaced the belt and fixed a little bend in the pulley off the motor. 
 

We did a little more investigation and pulled the motor out and found that the bearings in the motor had some pretty good wear. Have a new set ordered along with a pulley for the motor. 

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Looks like a pretty cool old piece of iron.

You going to take the pork chop off and paint it red just for some visual safety? 

"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not;  remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for." - Epicurus

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3 hours ago, Chet said:

Looks like a pretty cool old piece of iron.

You going to take the pork chop off and paint it red just for some visual safety? 

Honestly never thought about that. Going to consider it. 
 

the previous owner asked me if I was going to paint it. Don’t think I’m going to since it is original paint yet. 

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Doing a little research on this machine, found some cool facts about it.

 

Was made in 1974 and was offered with 3 different motors. 3/4 hp 1 hp and 1 1/2 hp which mine has. 
 

Had the option of 2 different bases, a tin one and a cast iron option. I have the the tin. 
 

There are 4 tapped holes in the outfeed table. I figured it was a power feeder mount but it didn’t make much sense since they were in the path of the cut. Found out they offered a grinder attachment for sharpening the knives. From what I have read they are impossible to find. 

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10 minutes ago, Coop said:

That’s cool to know. 15 or so years ago, without the aid of the internet, unless you were the original owner with the paper manual, you would have never known. Are knives still available for it? 

Yeah it’s neat to find scanned in original owners manuals. Whoever took the time to do something like that had quite the idea. 
 

Yeah the knives are pretty standard. Plan as of now is to put a set of new hss knives in, after they go dull to upgrade to the Byrd head. That is only going to happen if I can get the motor to stop vibrating. 

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Update....

 

Put the new bearings in the motor, and still have a slight vibration.  We figured out after checking with a dial that the shaft is just a little bent.  After putting the motor back in and running the jointer for a min or two could smell the belt heating up.  Ordered a new motor and it should be here monday.

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Knives showed up today and got them installed. What a difference! After a little messing around I have a machine that I’m pretty happy with!

Learned a few things in setting the jointer knives tonight. Since I recently swapped them out on the ridgid I had some practice going into this one. 
 

The head on the delta has the springs under the knives which works pretty nice. 1 spring was missing form the head which made that knife the most difficult to set. I figured I would get them close with a straight block of wood registering off the out feed table the check with a dial. I figure out to use the wood to push the knife down and lightly tighten one gibb bolt. I would then rotate the head and adjust the knife down with a smaller piece of wood and slightly tap the knife till the initial straight pice of wood sat flat on the outfeed table. Did this to all 3 knives and checked with the dial indicator. All were within .02. Felt that wasn’t enough difference to adjust any further. Ran a few pieces across the machine and it cut really nice! No snipe and even on some crazy grain ash minimal tear out. 

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16 hours ago, Jamie said:

1 spring was missing form the head which made that knife the most difficult to set.

I lost one spring also.  I learned this from somewhere but don't recall who it was, but a ball point pen spring works or in my case a half of a ball point pen spring.

It gives you enough tension to allow you to make the adjustment properly.

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"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not;  remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for." - Epicurus

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23 hours ago, Chet said:

I lost one spring also.  I learned this from somewhere but don't recall who it was, but a ball point pen spring works or in my case a half of a ball point pen spring.

It gives you enough tension to allow you to make the adjustment properly.

That is an awesome trick! If I ever pull these knives out again im going to try that!

Plan as of now is when these knives get dull is to replace the head with a byrd.  Will see at that point if I want to part with that much money tho

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4 hours ago, Jamie said:

Plan as of now is when these knives get dull is to replace the head with a byrd.  Will see at that point if I want to part with that much money tho

This is a fair point and I often see people put things like this off for cost reasons.  Just another thought to consider...  Have you ever seen a product go down in price other than a sale?  

I completely get it!  We can't afford everything we want when we want it!  Family is all of our first priority as it should be.

I guess my point is to decide where a particular item is on your shop priority list..  I know I have a list and I tackle those items on the list as money becomes available.  I really try not wait because waiting usually costs more money down the line.  I also move the more expensive items further up my priority list because the price changes on those items tend to hurt a little worse..lol

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Very good points guys.  I think the upgrade will happen in the next year or less.  Just had a few family things come up that have to be paid for first.  

 

I like the thought on putting the most expensive tools higher up on the list.  Man this list just got really expensive! ?

 

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