wayne booker
05-21-2012, 5:56 PM
Hey all,
I've had this old Jet 6" jointer for over a year now and it's been working great. What's not so great is pulling and re-installing, adjusting the knives. To be honest, it sucks. My method is using a dial indicator on mag base and steel straight edge. What takes so long for me is the constant end to end check/adjust/re-check/re-adjust stuff on each knife. When you move one end of the knife, the other end is affected.
I bought a jointer pal jig. It made it easier to adjust the knives parallel to the out feed table, but then another issue was not resolved: The fact that I have to hold the cutter head by hand with the edge of the knife at top dead center while wrenching on the knife locking bar nuts. The constant rolling the cutter head back and forth to make sure I'm touching the jointer pal ends up blunting the knife in that spot a little bit. Not by much but I can tell by touch. Steel on a steel edge, which one will lose.
What I needed was a way to hold the cutter head in one place, the same place for each knife. I know that some guys will wedge a piece of wood in there to jam it in place, but there's just something about that that I hate.
What would be nice is if the jointer manufacturers included an index locking feature. I did some web searching and was not able to find anyone talking about such a thing. I don't know, maybe I'm just being a weenie and should just live with it, I thought.
After more thought I came up with this. I got ahold of a 1/4" pin from Ace Hardware. Then I located the right position to drill a 1/4" hole through the small bearing housing, and with the housing in the right orientation on the cutter head bearing, I continued that hole into the end of the cutter head about 1/4". Then I made a wooden jig that would allow me to drill the same hole in the same place in the cutter head next to each of the knife positions. The pictures are pretty self explanatory.
So with this, I set up my knives using the jointer pal in 5 minutes flat. I never had to make one re-adjustment, each knife went in with 0.001" accuracy end to end and from knife to knife. I didn't have to roll the cutter head back and forth scraping against the straight edge, the knife stayed in one spot while I tightened the lockdown nuts, and because each knife was held at exactly the same position in relation to the center of it's rotation, all three knives were at exactly the same height in relation to the out feed table.
Take what you want from this, but it's working quite well for me. I know many of you guys can do it the old way with one had behind your back while hopping on three toes. That's all well and good for someone who has the years experience to do it. I'd rather spend my time cutting wood. If I've peaked your interest here, I have a more thorough writeup with more pictures here: http://lumberjocks.com/ic3ss/blog/30122
Wayne
I've had this old Jet 6" jointer for over a year now and it's been working great. What's not so great is pulling and re-installing, adjusting the knives. To be honest, it sucks. My method is using a dial indicator on mag base and steel straight edge. What takes so long for me is the constant end to end check/adjust/re-check/re-adjust stuff on each knife. When you move one end of the knife, the other end is affected.
I bought a jointer pal jig. It made it easier to adjust the knives parallel to the out feed table, but then another issue was not resolved: The fact that I have to hold the cutter head by hand with the edge of the knife at top dead center while wrenching on the knife locking bar nuts. The constant rolling the cutter head back and forth to make sure I'm touching the jointer pal ends up blunting the knife in that spot a little bit. Not by much but I can tell by touch. Steel on a steel edge, which one will lose.
What I needed was a way to hold the cutter head in one place, the same place for each knife. I know that some guys will wedge a piece of wood in there to jam it in place, but there's just something about that that I hate.
What would be nice is if the jointer manufacturers included an index locking feature. I did some web searching and was not able to find anyone talking about such a thing. I don't know, maybe I'm just being a weenie and should just live with it, I thought.
After more thought I came up with this. I got ahold of a 1/4" pin from Ace Hardware. Then I located the right position to drill a 1/4" hole through the small bearing housing, and with the housing in the right orientation on the cutter head bearing, I continued that hole into the end of the cutter head about 1/4". Then I made a wooden jig that would allow me to drill the same hole in the same place in the cutter head next to each of the knife positions. The pictures are pretty self explanatory.
So with this, I set up my knives using the jointer pal in 5 minutes flat. I never had to make one re-adjustment, each knife went in with 0.001" accuracy end to end and from knife to knife. I didn't have to roll the cutter head back and forth scraping against the straight edge, the knife stayed in one spot while I tightened the lockdown nuts, and because each knife was held at exactly the same position in relation to the center of it's rotation, all three knives were at exactly the same height in relation to the out feed table.
Take what you want from this, but it's working quite well for me. I know many of you guys can do it the old way with one had behind your back while hopping on three toes. That's all well and good for someone who has the years experience to do it. I'd rather spend my time cutting wood. If I've peaked your interest here, I have a more thorough writeup with more pictures here: http://lumberjocks.com/ic3ss/blog/30122
Wayne