Curt, if you can show me how to joint an eight inch board on a smaller jointer without removing the guard, I'm all for it.
A planer sled works, however it's painfully slow.
A hand plane, use them all the time however for most people the hand plane isn't practical.
Regards, Rod.
Sorry... had to do that.
I have a Taiwanese 6" jointer that works very well, but the beds are shorter than I'd like and sometimes I buy 8" stock which requires me to hand plane one face. If you can afford it, and have room, and can deal with mega heavy cast iron... go for the 8".
The guard needs to be removed, but the board you're face planing entirely covers the cutterhead so it, in effect, becomes your guard. Not difficult, not, IMO, nor particularly dangerous assuming the operator is paying attention, etc.
True, on both counts.A planer sled works, however it's painfully slow.
There was no mention of not removing the guard . People do it, I didn't endorse the idea. Frank has a point, the work covers the cutterhead completely. Just make sure that when the cutterhead exits the work all your appendages are well clear. I used the 'remove the guard and face joint a full width pass' when I had a 6" jointer. I could never get the second pass to match the first. I started using long narrow strips of plywood sort of like a planer sled. Joint one strip flat, lay that area on a strip of plywood and run the board through the planer. I didn't take heavy passes so the board didn't want to bow toward the unsupported edge. Once the opposite side was flat, flip the board over and plane the remainder of the partially face-jointed side away. This worked pretty well as long as the unjointed strip wasn't very wide. Usually it wasn't more than and inch or two. And yeah it was still time consuming.
Last edited by Curt Harms; 09-03-2014 at 7:57 AM.
It is not difficult to joint/flatten a board that is wider than the jointer. The explanation is longer than the process.
Never, under any circumstances, consume a laxative and sleeping pill, on the same night
When I described what a planer and a jointer do to my wife, she commented that the jointer name made sense, but the planer should be called a "paralleler". In our shop it has been so named ever since!
but I do like the banana analogy too!
Mike
Interesting, when I think of a plane, I think of it a straight surface. That's also what a hand plane produces.
A planer (in North America) doesn't produce a plane, it produces a parallel.
So Planer best describes a jointer, and thicknesser best describes a planer.
Regards, Rod.
You won't, the side face-jointed that way will always be a little irregular where the two cuts meet but that's okay because all you're after is a face flat and straight enough to provide a reference surface when you put the board through the planer, where a little irregularity on the face down won't affect anything; once the top face is planed to your liking, you turn the board over and clean up the face-jointed side.
Quite right; there's probably a youtube video showing just how to do it.Originally Posted by Mik Rian