Fantasizing about hobbyist equipment design

[Wes Grass]

Euro machines...

It's not a 'jointer', it's a 'surface planer'.

And then you move it to the 'thickness planer'.

[Robert Hazelwood]

The lever on an 8" parallelogram style jointer works fine. ~1/32" is what its set on most of the time but I can quickly bump that up to an 1/8" or whatever and then back down. The little scale next to the infeed table seems accurate enough - not sure what the benefit would be to a DRO there since when jointing you don't have a known exact amount to remove. Maybe you could set depth of cut to .047" but how would you know if that's enough or too much? If you can set it to "about 1/64", "About 1/32" and so on that's all you need, the way I see it. Perhaps it would be useful for rabbeting and oddball tasks, but I can't see it for regular face and edge jointing.

The lever is also very fast. I bet a motorized mechanism would be slower. Not needed on an 8" jointer at least.

What I do have an issue with is the lever on the outfeed table. The lever is fast but not too precise, and on the outfeed table I have no need for speed but I do want precision to 0.001". It's tricky to get right with a lever. A slow handwheel would be a lot nicer.

[Ron Selzer]

its one thing to wind a stroke sander table by hand that has big resistance up 30 inches, much lesser a planer table on a good machine up and down 8" This scm planer has no need for a power table it moves that nicely. A jointer table, are you kidding, we are moving some fraction of an inch.

You convinced me Warren. Have a Woodmaster Stroke "Sander that was given to me. Had to disassemble it to get it in the basement. Have it reassembled, dust collector connected need to extend the electric cord or make a short extension cord. Has a hand crank to move table up and down. Have been debating about cutting the crank, grinding three flats on it and chucking it up in a drill. Now I will cut it before even firing up. I have a Woodmaster 12" planer with same hand crank. This way I can power both up and down and then switch to hand crank for small adjustments while using.
Ron

[Rick Potter]

Like Robert said.

I have a Delta DJ20 8" parallelogram lever jointer. It has a lock for up and down on the infeed table, and it is set for about 1/32 on the shallow cut, and about 3/32 on the deep. I can cycle back an forth in about 5 seconds. I set it that way when new in the 90's and never had reason to change it.

My fantasy is that the table saw would adjust so easy. (Fantasy Alert .... just kidding)

[Warren Lake]

didnt even know they made a stroke sander but see they do. Looks on the light side like the moulder but they still work. Hopefully its not as difficult as the Progress one was to raise.