Thread: Automatic Jointer

I know that a cabinet shop that I used to get timber benches from had one that did all four side in one pass. I shudder to think what that would have cost

They are called 4 sided planers, some have considerable molding capability

There are a few around, Logosol make a planer molder
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCeNigIThYw

My cousin in italy has a fancy expensive one.
Not very good photos but here goes anyway.

Thanks! And this effectively joints it? Makes a bowed board flat? Or just makes it a uniform width and thickness?

Originally Posted by Cam.H

Thanks! And this effectively joints it? Makes a bowed board flat? Or just makes it a uniform width and thickness?

I depends on the dimensions of the stock and which bow you are referring to.
It will readily remove the bow across the width of a board, but given the pressure of the feed rollers, even though it has very long in-out feed tables it won't take the bow out along of the length of a thin board.
This is a problem for all jointers anyway.

My cousin mainly makes custom premium door and window frames and he usually only works with quality stock already rough cut to his specs and the 4-sider is used to just quickly tidy up the surfaces.
He has a separate moulding machine to cut profiles but he can replace the knives on the four sider if he needs to.
The frames are clamped and glued together on a large hydraulic frame so some bowing along length are not going to be that much of a problem to him.

I used to run a weinig 4 sided profile moulder equipped with a straightening infeed table. 5 cutter heads, left right top and two on the bottom. The first head on the bottom basically flattened one face to give a good solid reference to setup for the last 4 cutterheads. You could flatten and joint boards up to the length of the infeed table which was about 1.5m going from my terribad memory. anything longer than the infeed table presents the same problems as a normal jointer would, requiring multiple passes to get the edge straight before one final smoothing pass.

as bob says, thin boards dont flatten well because of the feed roller pressure being able to press the bow out of the board before machining. having 5 heads in the machine allowed the first head to be a bottom head which meant there was only one feed roller directly infront of the first head applying downwards pressure before the board is referenced to the table after the cut. the boards were not gunbarrel flat, but usually close enough for most applications.

There are 2-siders and 4-siders, crazy expensive, crazy powerful and lots of fun to use (I think)
Some of the Weinig machines feed up to 1000 m/min, yes that's 60 km/h, with up to 200kw per head :O