Woodmizer Jointer-planer

[Alex Zeller]

I worked with a guy who had a Woodmizer band mill. He also has a 4 sided planer (don't know the brand) but it was for making stuff like framing lumber. Think 2x4 type boards. Stuff that being perfectly straight mattered less that the time needed to do all 4 sides of a board. I asked him about hardwood and he said he rarely touched it. I have noticed around here that most mills only do softwood even though there's more hardwood than softwood trees around here.

[Kent A Bathurst]

........ does a 4 sided planer do the job of a jointer as well?

Not in the way you are probably thinking. As noted in other comments, there is a finished quality issue at play. At one of the many wood-related stops in my misspent youth, I worked at a place who had one part of the operation running a lot of molders.

If you want to run, say, rough-sawn, kiln-dried 4/4 wood into 1 x 6 boards with a finish acceptable for furniture, the molder has to have a minimum of 6 heads. You have to take the top and bottom to finished in 2 steps - get it hogged off to pretty close, then put the final surface on with the second station. Like a scrub-plane + jack + jointer combined [the molder does flat very well], followed by a smoother.

Big-time t&g flooring is run at 600 - 1,000 feet per minute on a 12+ head molder. Gotta take smaller bites at Warp 6. The arrangement of the side heads in the machine is also critical, as it the sequencing of top and bottom.

The hilarious part of all this is that the waste steam management [dust and chips] costs as much or more than the molders. Imagine the waste volume running 4/4 x 8" at 150 LFPM. You ain't blowing this into a 55 gal drum with a 3 HP cyclone.

But I digress.............

[Jim Becker]

The hilarious part of all this is that the waste steam management [dust and chips] costs as much or more than the molders. Imagine the waste volume running 4/4 x 8" at 150 LFPM. You ain't blowing this into a 55 gal drum with a 3 HP cyclone.

But I digress.............

Matt Cremona on the 'Tube just learned that directly...he borrowed an almost unused Woodmizer four head molder to run the oak flooring for their kitchen project and it produced barrels and barrels and barrels of dust/chips. Like a mountain of the stuff. They need a capable collector, too, because there's four separate connections that have to be serviced simultaniously.

[Kent A Bathurst]

Jim - exactly. Gen pop has no idea of the scale of what it takes. In the pro leagues, the waste stream exits a monster cyclone through a monster rotary airlock into an open-top trailer. There is an auger leveling system that pulls the peak of the waste pile to the back of the trailer, filling it up. The fan to pull the waste to the cyclone is driven by a 100 - 200 hp motor. Or more.

But - you cannot turn off the production operation to switch trailers - so there is another trailer parallel to the first, and the stream is diverted there and you swap out the full first trailer. And you gotta have a truck ready on the spot to do the swap before the 2d trailer overflows.

I buried the lede - sorry. Strolling into wood processing facilities as a consulting wiseguy for productivity improvement, I can't remember how many machines were limping along only because they couldn't pull the waste stream fast enough to run the machine at speed. Spent the big bucks on the machine, but short-changed the dust system.

[Jim Becker]

True for the big industrial setups, but I point was that the Wood Mizer four head molding machine, which is a modest ~$20K machine with commensurate throughput designed for a one person operation, still has significant dust collection requirements. Cermona was doing the work himself and his Clearvue cyclone was filling the 55 gallon bin every few boards of that oak flooring! Nathan of "Out of the Woods" on the 'Tube just uses a large blower and, um...blows...all the chips from his Wood Mizer four head machine outside where it scatters behind the shop.

[Richard Coers]

Woodmizer doesn't have anything to do with the manufacturing do they? When they started selling moulding machines, they were made in Europe. Pretty sure they have the manufacturer add their sticker on the machine. Looks like they bought the European company. https://woodmizer.com/us/wood-mizer-...planermoulders

[Joe Calhoon]

I would disagree that a S4S machine is not good for fine work. I use one daily in my work. The industrial ones like my Martin T 90 and the Weining Cube have straightening tables and fences that act in the same way as a jointer with a power feeder. These machines do require heavy electrical and dust collection setups. In the case of the Moretens machine you would need one flat face and edge to get good results since they are non straightening. Not for ever shop but I’m sure some could benefit from this type machine.

[Jim Becker]

As an aside and since the Wood Mizer 4 head molder came up in discussion, this new video from Matt Cremona has a short "guided tour" at the beginning of the machine which can be helpful in seeing how things are arranged in the machine. After the jointer work post-introduction, there's more time spend on the molder setup. The rest of the video is mostly about making the flooring but certain features the machine setup and use, too, if you want to watch for longer.