Changing carbide inserts in my jointer

[Joe Cowan]

I have a Grizzly planer and jointer, both with the spiral cutterhead. I rotated the carbide teeth in the planer last year, and stabilized the cutterhead by lowering the cutterhead onto a beam I placed under it, to keep the head from spinning as I loosened the teeth. I do not have that option on the jointer, so I was wondering about the easiest way to do this with the jointer. Any experience in this area out there?

[Mike Ontko]

I've got a similar setup on my jointer (Grizzly G0586 8" with a Shelix (Byrd) cutterhead). I bought the unit used from a high school woodshop instructor, so it was in pretty good shape to begin with. So far, I've only rotated a couple of the teeth and haven't actually replaced entire sets. But the cutterhead assembly seems to sit tight enough that there wasn't a need to support it while I loosend, repositioned, and then re-tightened each of the teeth.

[Peter Quinn]

I've never seen the need to lock the head, I pull the inserts with a t handle torx driver that matches the screw heads, the head stays stable enough. I label each row of knives with a sharpie so I don't get lost.

[Rob Damon]

When I turned mine on my jointer this is what I did:

-Lowered the infeed table as far down as it would go
-Placed a wood block on the infeed table against the fence
-The wood block was then pushed tight against the head and the wood block was then clamped to the jointer fence

That was enough to keep the head from turning.

[glenn bradley]

I have the G0490X and found no need to lock the head while rotating the inserts(?). You could certainly cut out a wedge on the bandsaw and stick it between head and some fixed portion of the machine but, I do not recall this being an issue . . . I am curious now as to why not . . . but it wasn't.

[Rob Damon]

Glenn, I locked it in place because I normally use the larger jointer and the smaller one seems to get belt position memory lock and when you rotate the head, it wants to shift back a little, thus loosing track of which cutter(s) were turned. By locking it down, I had a more systemmatic approach. Rob

[Scott DelPorte]

Rob, I have limited experience with this, but the inserts I rotated had a small mark in one corner. They were installed in the machine such that the mark was indexed to the same corner for all the inserts. It was easy to see which inserts had been rotated because you could tell that its mark had moved.

[ian maybury]

I've no direct experience, but suspect making sure the seats are 100% clean must be a big deal to ensure there's no tracks cut in the work….

[Rob Damon]

Scott, I only turn the ones that are showing signs of wear or have a nick in it. A couple of times a year I inspect each cutter insert one by one with a magnifying glass (eyes are what they used to be). If I turned them all at the same time, the mark in the corner would work fine for referencing which ones have been turned and which ones have not been turned.

[Andrew Hughes]

I had a jointer with the insert head I also wedged the head with apiece of wood to keep it in place.Be careful not to let any dirt fall into the screw hole.If you try to put a screw in there without cleaning it.Aggravation and bad bad words will soon follow.:(