Stock Feeder on a Jointer

[Chris Giles]

Guys,

Thanks for all the thoughtful responses to my post. Clearly this is a much deeper subject than I realized. Lou, we used to have one of these machines in our rough mill years ago when I worked in a furniture factory in Grand Rapids, Mich. In the midwest, it's called a surfacer, and is standard equipment in a large scale rough mill. It is a wonderful machine, and ours was not scary at all. The hundreds of metal spring-loaded fingers would take a board with any amount of distortion and flatten it on the bottom side in one pass. Then the board would continue down the conveyer to the planer for final thicknessing. Ours was 24" wide with a helical insert head, so it was very quiet and your hand never got any where near the blade. If I had the space, I'd hunt the auction sites for an old one. Even a relatively small shop could use one of these.

Marcus, I can certainly see how having a feeder on the outfeed of your large jointer would be essential for those massive mahogany boards. I usually end up rigging my wheel conveyers in position for support in this situation, but with mixed results. I just end up doing the contortionist's lean as I feed them through ( I weigh about 275, so I can do pretty big boards).

It seems that John's feeder is a small-shop version of one of these large surfacers, which are really all about the spring-loaded teeth that push the wood along without pressing it down flat as it passes over the cutterhead. I never knew such a thing existed, and I will look into it for my DJ20 soon.

[Brian Milidrag]

I also have a Felder...but smaller. Regarding your using a stock feeder on a jointer.....I assume you put it on the outfeed table only? can you email those pictures to me <bdrag@yahoo.com>

[Dan Rude]

Infinity tools has a smaller stock feeder now. https://www.infinitytools.com/mini-power-feeder Costs less then the bigger ones.

[Rod Sheridan]

Jointing 1.jpgHi Chris, some jointers have the ability to mount a feeder.

I use a feeder when I have lots of jointing to do. The feeder produces consistent work, and sure saves work when you have lots of pieces to joint.

My jointer doesn't have the feeder mounted on it, I simply swing the feeder around from the saw/shaper.......regards, Rod.

[Larry Edgerton]

My shaper is quite long and I have moved the jointer up to the back of the shaper, had to raise it 1' so the back of the fence bracket could ride over the shaper table, and then I just swing the feeder around to use on the jointer. The shaper weighs 3500# so I am not concerned with it moving. Works well when prepping rough stock as others have mentioned. Old hands, yata, yata, yata

[Alex Zeller]

Almost two decades ago when I was building my house I had to take down a couple cherry and sugar maple trees. Being too nice to put in the wood stove I had a guy come up with a portable mill. I think I ended up with around 4000 board feet of rough cut lumber. After sitting stickered for a year or so I finished it so I could use it for the house. I'm lucky because my neighbor is a professional woodworker with serious equipment. I used his Delta 20" jointer with a power feeder to do one face and edge. I started off doing it by hand to get things close as some of the boards needed more help than others. But after that I set up the feeder (on the outfeed side) and a friend and I spend a couple days using his jointer then planner then finally his cabinet saw (which we switched the power feeder over to) to do the last edge. It was a learning experience but I don't know if I would do it again. The really nice thing about the power feeder is when doing the edge it was able to always keep the flat face against the fence while putting a little down force on the outfeed table. For a couple boards it's probably not needed but for any amount of repetitive work you can't beat the accuracy.