There is a genius in the house. No, it is not me, just a Minimax C26 combo machine. In looking forward to retirement in a few years, I decided to get a quality machine now to replace my older Craftsman equipment. I have no complaints about the Craftsman equipment; it is more than 35 years old and served me well. Here is my assessment of the C26.
Delivery: Delivery was uneventful. Machine (and packaging) arrived in perfect condition. Machine was carefully packaged. Had it delivered to my garage with lift-gate service. Delivery company moved it into my garage with a pallet jack. Suggest if you have something delivered, followup with the delivery company just to make sure they understand it is lift-gate service. They would not have sent a lift-gate; I reminded them it was lift-gate, THEN they saw it on the order. Follow it every step of the way.
I had a different delivery company move it from my garage to the basement down a single flight of stairs. It was an adventure but it ultimately was moved safely and without damage to the machine.
Fit and Finish: Of course, the surfaces were covered with cosmoline. A few hours with mineral spirits removed it. There was nothing cosmetically wrong that I could see. The paint is uniform color, no scratches, everything seemed in perfect condition. All motors move easily.
The manual is the size of a small city phone book, about 3/4 inch in thickness. It is fairly detailed, translated from Italian so the phrasing in some cases is not clear. There are two things that I did not like about the manual: (1) the small size of the pictures and representations and (2) the instructions are on the back side of the page while the picture it refers to is on the opposite side, requiring one to flip back and forth. The illustrations are detailed, just small. There was a separate parts manual and separate electrical wiring diagram. The machine is 220v, three wire.
Setup: Setup took a few hours spread out over a few evenings. Tools required (open end metric wrenches and metric Allen wrenches) were provided with the machine. I purchased the machine through Sam Blasco (Minimax) ; he was extremely helpful during setup answering questions and providing advice.
Jointer outfeed table had to be lowered by a few thousandths so that boards would not catch on the lip. The process was pretty straight forward and accomplished in about 30 minutes. This was the only adjustment made and it was a very minimal adjustment.
Love the Tersa knives. Only took a few minutes to install them. Very, very sharp also.
It comes with a mobility kit. I'll need this in my small shop.
Operation: I have not run any wood through the machine yet, other than to test that everything works.
Changing from jointer to planer or vice versa takes 30 seconds or less. The longest time is to move the planer table either up or down. I'm not complaining, I like the fine table movement.
Additional comments: The pork chop guard on the jointer is plastic and does not really match the quality of the rest of the machine. I read somewhere on the internet where someone complained about breaking the pork chop guard when changing setups. While I have not broken mine, I can see how that could happen if you get careless during the changeup and do not move the guard out of the way. You have to be very careful moving it out of the way; I cut my finger on the Tersa knife. I was lucky it was very minor cut and taught me a very valuable safety lesson. Removing the guard for changeover each time seems impractical.
There is a guard attached to the fence that looks like it might be intended to cover the Tersa knives, but at its current location on the fence, it covers nothing. The manual discusses it some, but still not clear how it is useful. Perhaps as I use the machine, it will clarify itself. I'll keep an open mind.
Changing the saw blade may be a challenge. I only installed one blade and not tried to change it. It is really tight location to get the blade inside the dust shroud. Might just require a few tweaks to the process to simplify.
The fence may be a weak part of the system. As I have not tried edge jointing yet or ripping a board yet, I can not address this. It might work just fine. It seems to lock securely.
I'm in the process of adding a digital gauge for the planer. I drilled holes in the cast iron table for the bracket that will attach to the gauge. I'm returning the gauge for a replacement; the buttons on it were defective.
The crosscut fence that attaches to the sliding table is about 4 feet long. It is really nice, but is too long for routine use in my narrow space. I used some 80/20 extrusion to make a smaller crosscut fence. We'll see how this works out.
So, at this point, would I do it again? In a heartbeat. It appears to be a quality machine. Sam was responsive and helpful.
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