What Is a Jointer Used For?

Video Transcript

Hi, my name is Kevin and on behalf of Expert Village, I wanted to talk a little bit about machining solid wood. When you machine solid wood, what you want to do is get the board to be parallel on both sides and perpendicular to the two edges so that your wood is perfectly square all the way around and the first machine that you start with is the joiner. After you come back from the lumber yard and you've selected the wood that you're going to use, the first things you want to do is come to this machine and get a flat face on the wood. The way that that happens is that there are two beds on this machine and a set of cutter knives in the middle. This bed is adjustable up and down and this one stays flat. What you're going to do is you put the board down here on this table you run it across the knives and then it comes out flat on this table here so that you've established a good, flat face. When you use this machine, there are a couple things you want to keep in mind to where it's always a safe operation. Number one, you want to take the piece of wood that you're going to run over the joiner, we'll use this piece of walnut as an example, and you're going to want to put it down and adjust the fence left to right to the size of the piece and so, we've got it adjusted here and you lock it down. That way when you run the piece over the blades, there's no exposed knives for you to potentially cut yourself on. That's a real important safety feature that you want to employ when you're using this machine to keep yourself as safe as possible. Its not a good idea to ever run a piece like this and to leave multiple inches of blade exposes because it would be very easy for your hand to slip and get cut very badly on this machine. The other thing that you want to do with this machine and with most machines is you want to keep it waxed, that way the piece of wood slides very easily and it gives you a nice smooth cut. It doesn't do any good for these machines to get rusty and then be very stiff and coarse and you then you run it over and its bouncing, it's not going to give you a good clean face. You always want to keep it waxed, which is as simple as applying a very light coat of paste wax on there, letting it dry and then buffing it off with a rag which I can show you momentarily. But for right now, yeah, this the machine that you want to start with for solid wood to get it a good flat face. When you do that with solid wood, you got some decisions to make. You want to take a look at the wood and see if its cupped, bowed, what its doing because when it comes from the lumber yard, its in rough shape like this as you can see its been drawn on and that's fine, all that going to come off. But its really hard to tell exactly what the grain is doing because when you do run this over the joiner, you do as the cutter heads turn this way, you want the grain to be running that direction so you don't get what is called tear-out. What you literally want to do is take a look at the edge and as you can see, the grain is running downhill like this, so ideally what we would do is we would run the piece through like this, so that the blade is going the same direction as the grain and we don't get a lot of nasty tear-out on the board. It should make a nice smooth cut. But the other main thing that you have to keep in mind is you want to site down this board like this and you want to make sure that the board is cupped like this and not the other way because this machine wants to cut it and so if you have a seesaw effect, you'll just keep recreating that by doing this. So you really want the board to be contacting on two points as opposed to like as you can see here, its not moving, it will make a good smooth pass. But on this side, its kind of rocking a little bit and it creates a seesaw effect. It is possible to flatten it that way, but it just makes it more difficult and so you really want to examine that and make sure that it sits nice and smooth and flat as possible to get yourself a nice joint across there.

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