New Jointer G0490 - Need HELP

[Chris Jasmine]

Hi all,

I have been lurking here for awhile and finally need a question answered. To give you some back ground about me I am a begining to intermediate woodworker so dont hesitate to give me advise that seems like common knowledge to others.
I recently bought a Grizzly G0490. Durring the set up the out feed bed was out of parrellel with the cutter head. It took some patience but I was easily able to align the outfeed table with the knives. When I ran my first board through the jointer everything seemed to work fine except that the jointed edge did not end up smooth. The edge of all the boards that I ran through the jointer ended up with very faint wavy ridges across the direction of cut. I have used many jointers in the past but they all beloned to my friends and were already set up properly so I have no idea what adjustment I should start with. Can anyone give me a suggestion about what might be causing this wavy problem?

Cheers,

Chris

[Callan Campbell]

I'm no jointer guru, in my home shop it's the one machine I struggle to keep tuned up. Try checking that all the knives are even in height with your outfeed table. Kind of sounds like you have one high/misadjusted blade/knife or your feed rate is too fast. Hope this helps you out

[James G. McQueen]

Try to slow your feed rate down. This will make those ridges closer together and less noticable. You won't eliminate them completely. Start with this.

[glenn bradley]

My first thought is that if the table to knife adjustment was out, why didn't you adjust the knives to match the table? Did you check that the tables were not coplanar to confirm it was the outfeed table and not the knives? If not, your adjustment of the outfeed table has probably taken the tables out of relationship. The manual describes how to check on this and thank goodness you have a parallelogram-bed jointer as they are easy to adjust. :)

If your tables are still coplanar I would look to a couple things to avoid the scalloping you are getting. First try a slow feed rate to see if that minimizes the effect. A slower rate will put the scallops closer together but, we are looking to see if they are less "intense". If so, you're just feeding too fast, correct that and we're done. ;)

If not, try lowering your outfeed table very, very little and re-test. Lower a little bit more and re-test. If you reach the point where you start to get a bit of snipe at the end of the cut, that is a sign that we are too low and you will need to raise it very slightly until that behavior stops.

You are now at an optimum height on the outfeed table. Once I find that I adjust the outfeed table height stops to mark it. With a good feed rate and a technique of transferring your pressure on the material to the outfeed as soon as it is reasonable, you should see improvement. Please let us know how you fair.

P.s. As James notes, the very nature of how a jointer cuts takes small arched bites out of the surface. If you are setup right, going really slow will eliminate this but, normal speeds (whatever is normal for a specific machine) should leave barely noticeable marks.

[Chris Jasmine]

Simply slowing the feed rate did the trick! Thanks for the help!

[keith ouellette]

Simply slowing the feed rate did the trick! Thanks for the help!

slowing the feed rate worked because you probably have one knife slightly higher than the rest. Test each one in turn. When one was higher on my 490 I had the same effect. Moving slow worked for me also until i changed the height of the high knife. And it was not much higher to begin with.

[Chris Jasmine]

Thanks for the tip Keith.