Thread: Jointer or not that is the question

I think I told this before, I dry hardwood and quite often you get it bowing. Now if its a fairly bad bow the jointer tends to be a bit greedy if you are doing long planks. What I use is a flat box where I can clamp the wood in bow up, and feed it through the thicknesser. To me a jointer is a fine tune tool not a rough sizinging machine. I also add extentions to both ends which when your stock is 2.4M is a help.

You can get by without a jointer. I did for most of my wood butchering life. The trade off is a lot of hard work, time and compromise. I avoided the real hard woods as being too dam hard to hand to plane. A hand electric is ok to clean up wood but is almost impossable to square up with (well for me it is). About 2 years ago I got an old combination machine and the jointer is the most labour saving device in the shed. A bit like saying you can get about on a bike, but then try a car.
Regards
John

Originally Posted by rrobor

What I use is a flat box where I can clamp the wood in bow up, and feed it through the thicknesser..

I have trouble visualizing the flat box and clamping the timber to it. How can you clamp the timber in this fashion to a "flat box" and pass it through the thicknesser? Can you post a pic of your method. or explain it more in detail thanks.

take my truck, kick the cat all you want, lock me in a room with nothin' but country music playin' .....can handle all that, but keep your mitts off my Jet 6c jointer

Originally Posted by Ed Reiss

take my truck, kick the cat all you want, lock me in a room with nothin' but country music playin' .....can handle all that, but keep your mitts off my Jet 6c jointer

Fair enough

Ok its not so hard to explain I start with a flat board of pine, On that I have two sides of a reasonable thickness to keep the board flat I then put ends on to keep the sides from bending out. I now have a box, 2.6 M long without a lid. I can now set my bowed piece of timber with the bow up against one side of the box and with wooden blocks and wedges secure it. As the bottom of the box is flat, the thicknesser thickens to that. I am though worhing on some way of clamping to a piece of aluminium tube and using the bench saw as the first rough cut. I hate using the jointers etc for rough work on red gum as it bunts them at a fast rate.

Originally Posted by rrobor

I hate using the jointers etc for rough work on red gum as it bunts them at a fast rate.

You need to get some decent blades then. I joint a lot of Red Gum and have no problems at all.