Page 2 of 3 FirstFirst 123 LastLast
Results 16 to 30 of 40

Thread: Jointer knife setting

  1. #16
    Quote Originally Posted by David Kumm View Post
    SAC uses the same mechanical motor brake on it's planer. They used pretty thick steel compared to most newer machines so the tables are well supported. Good find. Dave

    I got it in your backyard. It was in Eau Claire.

  2. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by Larry Edgerton View Post
    I have what looks to be the same jointer [Older} but with an SCM label. I use glass myself, but with a small twist. I put a drop of water under the glass so I can see it lift easier. No brake on mine, but it stops fast enough for me.

    Nice find. I am really happy with mine. It does as good a job as my old Porter but takes up about a third of the real estate.

    I'd freak out putting water on cast iron. I know I'd leave one drop, that would rust, and I'd lose it. You could use something like LPS3 though, and not ever worry about it, and it would show the same thing.

    If you hit the power off button while holding the brake release, 34 seconds for it to wind down. That was without any knives or gibs in the head too. I'm curious how long it would take with a little more weight spinning around. I didn't measure it with the brake on. The manual states 10 seconds or less, I feel like it's a whole lot longer.




    I had kind of a funny thought when I was driving home from picking this thing up. I have more money wrapped up in equipment that is either sitting in storage, or otherwise unused sitting in my shop, than what I actually started my shop with. Made me laugh. I need to get into my new building so I can get all this stuff put to work! It will be a relief just being able to get the stuff that is in storage or not in use just getting it into the new building, even while I'm still working in the current shop. It'll free up a bunch of space in the shop, and I can stop renting a storage unit, and stop taking up space in friend's and family's spaces.

  3. #18
    Join Date
    Jan 2013
    Location
    Williamstown,ma
    Posts
    996
    Having set jointer and planer knives for quite a few years, I do not understand the need for, or use of glass in setting??
    Like was said earlier, a dial gauge, or stick of wood is all i have used.
    Seems strange.

  4. #19

  5. #20
    Join Date
    May 2016
    Location
    North -Eastern Ontario, Canada
    Posts
    271
    I thought these were fairly common from several sources...

    http://dimar-canada.com/pdf/MagneticKnifeSetter1.pdf

    not having straight knife jointer or planer now, I don't have one. But we had a similar, factory supplied jig to set the knives on our old sicar jointer and planet.

    Just a question: you say you don't do much jointing. But you said you make a lot of wooden doors. How are you processing your frame and panel stock flat? Are you not buying rough material? Just curious. I couldn't survive without our heavy duty jointer as it's the first real step of processing any rough lumber after rough cutting to length.
    Andrew J. Coholic

  6. #21
    Quote Originally Posted by Darcy Warner View Post

    Thanks Darcy, that's what I have as well, but I'm going to save that file anyways. It doesn't have the operating instructions, just he exploded views




    Quote Originally Posted by peter gagliardi View Post
    Having set jointer and planer knives for quite a few years, I do not understand the need for, or use of glass in setting??
    Like was said earlier, a dial gauge, or stick of wood is all i have used.
    Seems strange.

    I always thought it was a weird way to do it as well. I think using a dial gauge is strange too. I think the stick is the easiest when you can easily adjust the height of the knives. This one, if the gibs are loose, it will push the knife out. I think if you use a piece of glass, or setup blocks to hold the knife down you can just let the springs push up the to the glass or blocks then tighten the gibs. Glass is cheap, I'll give it a shot.

  7. #22
    Water on metal forget it. You want to pick up a piece of glass bevel the edges so you can grab it. Martin I get wanting to keep your surfaces clean, I had to let that go. Machines in too much humidity rusted. Odd time a beer was put down then remember why I was not supposed to do that, water leak above a table saw looked like it had been hit by buck shot. Had a recent leak so need to clean that up. Ill detail cars and paint and make them better than they came from the dealer. On the machines had to let that thought pattern go. as long as the top is rust free and waxed up well thats all the matters to me now. All of the steel on these machines is different, when i had high humidity some would be rusting, others nothing. Some would stain and it seems like they are almost porous and the stain just goes down deep. it will never come out. Ive used Jacks technique to bring some stuff back to life, better not to do the damage in the first place. now that you brought it up ill probably be looking at my surfaces again.

  8. #23
    I'm with Peter on this one. No need for the glass at all in fact it really won't work the way that you think it will. But to see for yourself use the glass technique and then use a dial indicator to check your results. I have found that tightening up the gib screws causes the knife to rise or dive almost always. I have taken gib screws to my surface grinder to put a square and flat finish on them and this helps. As others have said place a line on the jointer table and two lines on a straight edge. I used a heavy aluminum rule. Set up the straight edge over the knife which is at say 11 0'clock with the first line over top the line drawn on the jointer table. Now rotate the cutter head by hand and the knife will drag the straight edge and by watching the lines you can see when the knife is at the same height across the outfeed table as the second line should land on the table line. I like my knives about .002 -.003" above the outfeed, the two lines on my straight edge reflect this amount of travel. I also fashioned up a small metal hook that I can use to pull the knife up at the ends if the gib screws are causing it to dive. Swap knives out like this a few times and it is a simple task and you'll have a great set up. Once again a dial indicator will really show you what's going on in a set up. Only really needed the first time. The glass technique gives you a false sense of a job well done.

    Thankfully a Tersa head has made all of this redundant in my shop. Thank you Tersa!

  9. #24
    Quote Originally Posted by Andrew J. Coholic View Post
    I thought these were fairly common from several sources...

    http://dimar-canada.com/pdf/MagneticKnifeSetter1.pdf

    not having straight knife jointer or planer now, I don't have one. But we had a similar, factory supplied jig to set the knives on our old sicar jointer and planet.

    Just a question: you say you don't do much jointing. But you said you make a lot of wooden doors. How are you processing your frame and panel stock flat? Are you not buying rough material? Just curious. I couldn't survive without our heavy duty jointer as it's the first real step of processing any rough lumber after rough cutting to length.

    I get my material mostly at 13/16", and straightlined one edge.

    Typically my rail and stile size for doors is 2-1/4". So are my paneled ends. My average job has about 70 cabinet doors, and maybe 60 drawer fronts of which probably 40 are paneled fronts. I also use that same 2-1/4" width for doing the stiles on my paneled ends. Figure about 500' of sticking.

    This is assuming everything is the same specie in the job.

    I just rip. If I get a board that is giving me a bunch of trouble, I might rip over sized, then joint it back in straight, but 90% of the time, I'm just ripping. I rip my parts at 2-3/8", then do the sticking cut. I use an outboard fence on the shaper, it has a little bit of straightening ability, not much though.

    Once the sticking cut is made, the part should be 2-5/16" wide. I sort all of the sticking, maybe 60 rips of 8' material, by straightness. Five piles typically. Perfect, good, okay, not great, crap.

    The next step for me is cutting the stiles for the paneled ends to length from the crap pile. I leave them oversize to allow for cutting a bevel on them to bevel into my face frames. So a panel that needs to finish at 24-1/8", is 24-1/4" before having the bevel cut. I run the wall side across the jointer taking off a 1/16", then cut another 1/16" off when I do the bevel. With a few exceptions, you can run some pretty banana'd material and get away with it since you can clamp and twist it into the box work, and it's not going anywhere once it's on there. The boxwork, face frame, and back will over power anything messed up with it.

    The rest of the sticking left over gets sized in the shaper as well. Then I just cut my largest stiles and rails out of the straightest material. Paneled drawer fronts can come out of pretty twisted up material too since most of the lengths are pretty short, (at least with stiles), and I've got a dovetailed hardwood box to pull that front flat against.

    If things go well, I've got a couple of "okay" sticks left over.





    It's funny you bring this up, I had a guy recently quit because he felt he was going backwards with his skill set, and this was one of his points of contention. I agree that you will get a better product face jointing everything, but I can pitch a lot of material for the cost of adding that operation. The money just isn't there to pay for adding another 30-40hrs of lumber processing with what I have for equipment. Even if you cut that number in half. Call it 20 hours, at $25/hr an employee is costing me more like $35/hr. That's optimistically $700. Plus the cost of disposal, which is always a problem for any shop. Either manually emptying dust collectors, or paying to haul it away.

    Face frames, don't really matter, they've got all of the boxwork and the sum of their parts to hold things straight. If it's lifted off of a box, throw another nail or clamp at it, and it's at worst a 10 second solution

    This is the best work arounds I've come up with to avoid adding what is realistically at least another $2-3k of cost into an average house of cabinets, which is about $40k for me with no finishing or installation costs figured in. I'm expensive as heck anyways. I'm paying $.10 a board foot for surfacing, I can't joint and plane the 1000 bd/ft that goes into the average house between doors, drawer fronts, drawers, face frames for $100. There's some woods it's unavoidable. Some will twist up like crazy, and you just have to. I've gotten hosed by mahogany before. I just avoid trying to sell those species. lol 90% of what I do is inset, there's a stop at the top of the door, the bottom is just hanging in space, so it needs to be fairly straight or it will be a problem. On overlay something has to be really jacked up to be a problem. I don't think I've ever defected a door on an overlay job because of it being wonky. I run a 3/32" margin all around and I bet 1 out of 500 doors is such a problem child that it needs to be remade or pitched. Another trick is to crown your material, so if a door hooks, it always hooks in. The self closing hinges are always putting a little bit of pressure in towards the opening anyways, but if it hooks out, you're hosed. A messed up door can often times be held straight be using a shelf as a stop with a bumper towards the bottom or on the lowest shelf. I'd probably change my tune on that if I didn't use adjustable hinges though. It's almost futile here. In the winter, humidity will bottom out around 20%, and be close to 100% in the summer. Things will move and no amount of jointing will prevent that either if the house humidity and temperature aren't well controlled.


    Too long? I thought that was too long.

  10. #25
    Join Date
    Dec 2008
    Location
    Northern Michigan
    Posts
    4,973
    Interesting comparing processes Martin. I only use the jointer on cabinet boards that the planer will not take care of, but mostly I use it for other projects like entry doors. I have found I can get stock good enough by making a few passes through the planer at high speed, flipping every pass, then final pass on low speed. I figure I will lose some but they will make good drawer stock, so no real loss. I don't do many cabinets any more though, and if I did I would be looking to streamline, but for the one off stuff I have been doing speed is not my major concern. I do face joint all entry door stock,, rough plane oversize and let set a few days to see what it does, but not for cabinets.

    I tried the dial indicator, pain in the butt as far as I am concerned. I had the glass pieces made thirty years ago, they are always flat, edges are ground, and in the top of my toolbox when I need them. I hold the end down with magnets, and just watch the water. I have a magnetic setting tool but it will not work on carbide. I gently tighten the gib screws, and the knives do lift as someone mentioned, but I just watch the water and tap them down with a block of wood till they are at the right height and tighten up the rest of the way. Works fine for me but if it doesn't work for someone else, well, thats just how the world works, to each his own. The water is a concession to my eyes getting old. I usually wipe down the machine and treat the top at the same time so it is not really a problem

  11. #26
    Join Date
    Feb 2003
    Location
    Bellingham, WA
    Posts
    1,933
    How do you clean up your door outside edges?

    I used to invest way too much time into material prep. Even with power feeders on a pair of jointers, it would be close to a full day to face joint, plane, edge joint, and rip to width. Our 410 jointer is mostly used as a table to hold sets of staves before glue-up...
    JR

  12. #27
    Quote Originally Posted by Larry Edgerton View Post
    Interesting comparing processes Martin. I only use the jointer on cabinet boards that the planer will not take care of, but mostly I use it for other projects like entry doors. I have found I can get stock good enough by making a few passes through the planer at high speed, flipping every pass, then final pass on low speed. I figure I will lose some but they will make good drawer stock, so no real loss. I don't do many cabinets any more though, and if I did I would be looking to streamline, but for the one off stuff I have been doing speed is not my major concern. I do face joint all entry door stock,, rough plane oversize and let set a few days to see what it does, but not for cabinets.

    I tried the dial indicator, pain in the butt as far as I am concerned. I had the glass pieces made thirty years ago, they are always flat, edges are ground, and in the top of my toolbox when I need them. I hold the end down with magnets, and just watch the water. I have a magnetic setting tool but it will not work on carbide. I gently tighten the gib screws, and the knives do lift as someone mentioned, but I just watch the water and tap them down with a block of wood till they are at the right height and tighten up the rest of the way. Works fine for me but if it doesn't work for someone else, well, thats just how the world works, to each his own. The water is a concession to my eyes getting old. I usually wipe down the machine and treat the top at the same time so it is not really a problem


    Everybody does have their own way. The reality is that I build things to a price point. Virtually everybody does. I work in a decent market, most of the time they have budgets all the same as anyone else though. Rarely do I get something where there's a blank check, and the mandate to just make it happen. Maybe certain aspects, but never the entire job. My customers are happy, I'm happy with what I build from a pride and profitability standpoint and I feel that's a success for any business no matter what field or segment you work in. Some guys are content doing the starter homes, some won't touch anything other than the ultra high end. And that's fine. We all find our spot.

    If I were making pass doors, I would certainly be face jointing everything. A small twist in a passage door can be a nightmare since there is so many constrictions to how a door can be placed in a framed opening and the overall size versus a regular cabinet door will make that flaw exponentially larger. Someday I might take that on, but I am ill equipped the way the shop is now. A couple here and there, sure. But on the regular it would be a nightmare for me.


    I have wanted to try building pass door by basically glueing two cabinet doors together. I've kicked it around since you could have two different species or door styles on each face. Different specie might cause problems, but doing raise panel with a ogee sticking on one face, and shaker flat panel on the other. I'd probably use epoxy, and a crude press using red iron beams and a unit of MDF sitting on top to act as a press. It'd need some refinement if I wanted to move the idea to a production process though. Currently with all of my paneled ends I pocket screw the rails into the stiles. That could work well I'd think on pass doors as well instead of relying solely on cope and stick, adding dowels, or tenoning them together. Though it might not be as good. I don't know.

  13. #28
    Quote Originally Posted by J.R. Rutter View Post
    How do you clean up your door outside edges?

    I used to invest way too much time into material prep. Even with power feeders on a pair of jointers, it would be close to a full day to face joint, plane, edge joint, and rip to width. Our 410 jointer is mostly used as a table to hold sets of staves before glue-up...

    Shaper. I run the sticking to finished size with a four wing opposite shear, straight knife head. I run them a bit oversized. A 2-1/4" rail or stile comes off the shaper at 2.260" That makes my door a freckle oversized, then I edge sand them in.



    On overlay I just run them to a size manually. One of the things I want to try when I finally get a cnc is to build the doors with the only the sticking cut being made on the rail and stile. So the sticking would be 2-5/16" when the door is assembled. I'd have to cut the stiles a 1/8" oversized in length. Assemble the door, throw them on the CNC to size them, sand the faces in the widebelt, then just sand the faces and edges with a DA. Might not pay doing it on an overlay job that has 1" margins, but doing full overlay with 1/8" margins I think it would be time well spent. Edge sanding a door to a size and square is a challenge for somebody who hasn't done it a zillion times, (as I'm sure you know). Cumlative errors when doing full overlay can be a nightmare, a CNC should make them flawlessly to size, and square and should negate that. One of the local cabinet door builders, like you, does it this way on everything and I thought it was pretty smart. It might take way too long too, I don't know until I do it. It probably depends how suction zones and the pins are laid out on the CNC. If you can off load and load while it's cutting a door on the other end of the machine, it might go pretty quickly.


    On inset, I actually scribe them into the opening. I edge sand the hinge side, then typically sand the bottom edge so it fits in the corner perfectly, then I use a scriber to mark the outside top edges, and then mark the top and bottom edges of the side opposite of the hinge. For pairs I save the edge opposite of the hinge until everything else is done, then just sand those edges that come together to a number until the pair as a whole get me to what I want. I shoot for a 1/4" strong less than the overall opening. It goes quicker than you'd think. a 1/64" flaw spread out over three margins once adjusted is basically nothing and it's a whole lot less critical of a point to hit than when doing singles.

  14. #29
    Join Date
    May 2016
    Location
    North -Eastern Ontario, Canada
    Posts
    271
    Quote Originally Posted by Martin Wasner View Post
    I get my material mostly at 13/16", and straightlined one edge.
    Thats what I figured. Wouldnt work up here. MAterial changes hands too many times, sits in various warehouses etc and nothing I have ever bought in pre-milled ever stayed flat or straight.

    Youll like having a large jointer I think.
    Andrew J. Coholic

  15. #30
    Quote Originally Posted by Andrew J. Coholic View Post
    Thats what I figured. Wouldnt work up here. MAterial changes hands too many times, sits in various warehouses etc and nothing I have ever bought in pre-milled ever stayed flat or straight.

    Youll like having a large jointer I think.
    Here it's milled before it goes on the truck, I'd be surprised if more than a day passes between getting surfaced and showing up at my door.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •