Woodworker's Journal fall-2008, страница 12

When purchasing a new jointer or planer, one consideration you'll need to make is ease of knife adjustment. Today's auto-indexing insert cutterheads offer excellent performance with no maintenance headache.

A jointer and planer give you more control over the initial cost, species options and, of course, final trueness and thickness of your stock. For serious woodworking, you're going to need them both.

Jointers and Planers

No one feeis the brunt of wood distortion more than a woodworker without a jointer and planer. Even if your lumber is flat as a pancake when you buy it, there's no guarantee it will stay that way over time or especially when you rip it to width. As long as wood grows on trees, it's gonna distort.

Without the benefit of these fundamental surfacing machines, you have two recourses for salvaging unruly lumber: flattening and truing with hand planes or applying brute force to bend things to your will. The former takes skill and the latter, brawn.

Additionally, your options for stock thickness, quality and sometimes even species are limited to what's pre-sur-faced and ready for use. And, factory surfacing makes lumber more expensive than it needs to be.

Granted, a joiner and planer constitute a big chunk of change, but keep an open mind about the benefits. For one, you'll be able to purchase rough-sawn stock more economically and from a much wider variety of sources

say good-bye to knife-setting hassles

when you can surface it yourself. Second, you'll finally he able to take control over material thickness. If 1/2" door panels or a 7/8" desk top is what you need, crank your planer there and go to it. But most importantly, you'll be able to start each project with truly fiat, square and uniform stock ... and that benefit translates directly into better accuracy.

Although it might be tempting to buy just one of these two toots, surfacing is a two-machine operation. A jointer flattens faces and edges, while a planer creates a parallel face and reduces stock thickness. There's no overlap in function ... you need both.

For a home shop, a 6" jointer will offer about 45" to 60" of table length. It's adequate for smaller projects, but I suggest saving up and investing in an

8" machine. The extra table length sure makes long or thick lumber easier to manhandle, and I find that the wider cutterhead seems just right for average-width stock. Concerning cutterhead styles, I've used both conventional-knife planers and carbide-insert cutterheads. I love the inserts: you'll never sweat over finicky knife setting, and the inserts cut as smoothly as knives but with less noise.

As for planers, I'm impressed with today's 12" to 13¹/:'¹ benchtop models. Their power, accuracy and capacity make them excellent values for the money. Buy one with a cutterhead lock and two speeds. The faster speed is great for initial thicknessing, and the slower "finish" setting will help you tame figured or gnarly grain with less tearout. You won't find a benchtop planer with an insert-style cutterhead yet, but plenty of models feature disposable, self-indexing knives. It makes knife changes quick and easy. Of course there are larger industrial-quality planers from which to choose, but for a home shop, stick with a benchtop machine and buy a dust collector for it. You'll need it! Then, use that same collector to gobble up debris from the jointer, table saw and router table.

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