Rikon 12" Planer jointer

[Pierre Laliberte]

Has anyone been using the Rikon 12" Planer Jointer? If yes what is your opinion of this machine compared to other similar jointer/planer?

[ed vitanovec]

I too was curious about this machine, its been out for almost 2 years now. I did call Rikon about 2 months ago and they never sent me literature via email like they promised, it wasn't Rod I spoke to.....may have been someone new there.

[jonathan eagle]

They have two versions. Are you talking about the larger version? I've seen it up close, but not run it.
Rikon has a sales office in massachusetts, and I visited recently.
Jonathan

[Pierre Laliberte]

It is the larger version the 25-200 model, I think Fine Wood Working was supposed to do a review at some point in times but I have not seen much discussions or comments about this machine yet?

[George Gyulatyan]

I have the smaller 10" version.

Overall, it's OK. The one thing that I don't like is that the only adjustment for the jointer tables to make them coplanar are a couple of set screws on the outfeed table. While this is fine for the jointer tables, this means that there is really no good way to ensure that the tables themselves are parallel to the cutter head. This means that while you can adjust the knives to be parallel to the jointer tables, if your tables aren't dead on parallel with the cutterhead, your knives are now going to be out of alignment with the planer table. This can lead to issues where you don't get exact cuts in planer mode, or one side of the planer will feed the stock through just fine, but the other side won't.

So, it can be a pain to adjust everything so that both the jointer and the planer are happy.

Again, this is for the 10" model, the 12" version might have more/better adjustment features.

[George Gyulatyan]

Oh, one more thing. I don't particularly care about how the dust collection works on it either. I have a ShopFox 1.5hp dust collector, which does fine on my table saw, but I always have to blow the chips out of the planer bed on the Rikon.

[Gina French]

I have the smaller 10" version.

Overall, it's OK. The one thing that I don't like is that the only adjustment for the jointer tables to make them coplanar are a couple of set screws on the outfeed table. While this is fine for the jointer tables, this means that there is really no good way to ensure that the tables themselves are parallel to the cutter head. This means that while you can adjust the knives to be parallel to the jointer tables, if your tables aren't dead on parallel with the cutterhead, your knives are now going to be out of alignment with the planer table. This can lead to issues where you don't get exact cuts in planer mode, or one side of the planer will feed the stock through just fine, but the other side won't.

So, it can be a pain to adjust everything so that both the jointer and the planer are happy.

Again, this is for the 10" model, the 12" version might have more/better adjustment features.

Hello George,
I have the Rikon 10 inch jointer planer that I got about 8 years ago. I have never been able to get it set up well. Finally the last few weeks I have been spending all my shop time on it, figuring, if I could get it to work well I'd be much more productive in the end. I finally gave up and made a fence for it out of plywood and after much shimming of the various fence attachment parts have a fence that is at a right angle to the tables. I finally got the outfeed table shimmed up flat and parallel to the infeed table. Now I'm looking at the blades and thinking my way through what to do about them. As you mentioned, I could set them level and parallel with the out feed table, but that may cause me some problems on the planer table. I have this sinking feeling that if I do get the jointer set up, I'm going to convert it to planer, find out it can't plane and then try to convert it back to jointer and find out that I'm back where I started from with everything out of square. Did you figure it out? Junk it?

Thanks
Gina