Little Nicks on Knives...

[Edward Garrett]

Is there any way to minimize the small little knicks that I see in my jointer and planer knives? I have noticed very small lines on my workpieces after going through my jointer (8" Grizzly G0490) and planer (20" Grizzly G0454)....both relatively new machines with the factory knife set. One close inspection, I found VERY SMALL nicks on the knives.

I have ~200 BF through each (all hard maple), and it seems a waste of money and time to need to keep chaging blades (I just changed the blades on the jointer and it was a royal PIA....good things my kids were not in hearing-distance of the shop!).

I am trying to very careful about inspecting the rough boards for dirt, nails, etc. Anything else I should looks for or be doing prior to dimensioning this stuff? Is there a tool I could use to touch-up these VERY SMALL nicks? Should I have the blades sharpened differently?

[Dan Boschen]

Other than sharpening the whole set, the only way I know to continue to use slightly nicked knives is to very slightly adjust one knife sideways so that it will knock off the ridge that the other two knives are leaving behind. That will get you by until the set is resharpened.

[David Weaver]

I get the nicks on my planer blades, too, as well as the jointer knives. Sometimes, they show up after the planer runs over a knot, and sometimes I don't know what causes them. I just plane the lines out.

The only thing I think you can do is try different brands and quality levels of knives.

It would be nice to be able to put a more blunt microbevel on the knives, but most of them say not to touch them or change the cutting angle.

Has anyone on here tried that? It would require tooling to make sure that after applying the microbevel, the blade edge was still a straight line.

Here's another question for you while I'm rambling on - do you know for sure that they're high speed steel knives? If not, you should try to get a hold of HSS, and of course, there are different quality levels within that. Blades that are properly made HSS knives should last longer than 200bf.

Oh - and one last thing. Give Grizzly CS a call and see if they have any idea how long they expect the knives to last.