Hey All,

A couple of the fine folks here gave me some good advice a few weeks back which resulted in me buying my first new woodworking machine, a Jet 12" jointer/planer. Everything I have was effectively broken or missing parts when I bought it. I've enjoyed getting them working, but my skills are getting such that I want to move to the next level, which to me starts with better equipment. One thing I HATE is tuning a machine - I like to do something with them, not fiddle with them.

I've had the Jet machine in my garage for the last few weeks and just moved it into my basement this past week. I took great care to minimize any table readjustment, but I'm struggling with it already. I got it hooked up and it seems to work fine for face jointing and planing, but edge jointing does not seem to work well at all. After edge jointing a 4' board and putting it on a piece of glass I find that the left most and right most points contact the glass, but the middle 2/3 of the board are arced, in the neighborhood of almost 1/32. An 18" board is nearly perfect, but anything beyond that just has too much of a gap for my intended use. It may very well be (perhaps even likely) user error. My approach is to use my left hand to hold the stock against the fence and down on the outfeed table, with my right pushing the stock. I've tried with varying levels of pressure, both down and back, but after say 30 repeated joints of an edge I wound up with a board that looks like a trapezoid of sorts (3" at one end, 5" at the other).

Does anyone have a repeatable technique that would yield good jointed edges over an 4' or ideally 8' board? I'm not looking for NASA level tolerances, I'm just a homeowner hack that wants to build some furniture, but many of the projects I have in mind are more than 18" so I'll need to fix this problem.

Any ideas? I've googled the heck out of the Internet and have yet to find a good site or set of videos that help with technique and tuning of machines. Most manuals are weak at best.

Can anyone help? If you are local to me and are willing to show me a few things, I'll treat for a burger and a beer (after any tool use, of course). :-)

Thanks!

- Paul