What are parralleogram jointer tables?

[joe pezza]

I am an avid woodworker, and I want to upgrade to a 8" jointer, but what is the difference, and what advantage is there to parralleogram jointers.

thanks and have a great holiday weekend.
joe p

[Kyle Kraft]

The advantage to a parallelogram jointer is the ability to accurately tweak in the infeed and outfeed tables to the cutterhead and to each other. This is accomplished with eccentric pins or bushings on the parallelogram pivot points.

Otherwise you have to shim and fiddle with the dovetail style tables and just get it as close as possible.

[Jim Becker]

A parallelogram jointer maintains equal distance from the cutter head as you adjust the depth of cut due to the way the tables move. They also hold their adjustment nicely. It's a very nice feature if you make changes in your cutting height, but most folks, including myself, set the thing at about 1/32" and leave it there "forever"...

[John Hulett]

How much adjusting do you really do, though? It seems like most of the time, you set it to a minimal cut and just leave it. No?

- John

[glenn bradley]

As Jim states the tables stay an equal distance from the cutter head while raising or lowering. I don't change my jointer tables much but since this is the first critical step in squaring lumber; if I move them I want them to stay in a good relation to each other and the cutter head.

I would probably be hard pressed to use a jointer enough to wear out dovetail ways. But knowing my luck, I'm just going to go ahead with the p-beds from the get-go and be done with it.

Some folks have reported DC problems with the narrow gap at the cutter but most have solved this with a simple chute modification on jointers that exhibit this.