I have tasted the forbidden fruit of the electro-jointer, and I sort of like it. I have a Delta JT-160 benchtop deal, which I thought would be better than nothing. It sort of is. Sort of. It has given me a taste of what mechanical precision can do that hand planes in my fumbly and unskilled fingers cannot, but it's a slightly bitter taste. (I love'em, but they're definitely not precision tools in my hands I'm afraid.)
I've just about convinced myself to ditch this thing and buy a real jointer. Something with:
- cast iron tables
- a real fence
- tables long enough to joint a 4' board without sniping the hell out of it
The benchtop does OK with boards up to maybe 2' long, which is useful, but not quite useful enough. I've barely used it, and I'd like to box it back up in all the original packaging and find a nice new home for it. Surely someone out there would love to have a nice almost new Delta JT-160. :) Then I'll turn around and buy either the Grizz or the bigger Delta.
I'm looking spec for spec, trying to figure which one is better worth looking at. Price for price, they're similar enough that it doesn't much matter. The Delta is available cash and carry, while the Grizz is mail order. The Grizz has handwheels, the Delta doesn't. The Delta has a 4" dust port, the Grizz doesn't.
I don't have a DC, and don't have room for a DC. There's no way my shop vac trash can deal could keep up, so I suppose I have little practical alternative but to continue ejecting the chips onto the floor. That gives my daughter something to do anyway. She likes to sweep my shop, and no, that's not mandatory gender role enforcement on my part. She just likes to sweep. Who am I to argue with that?
So, the dust port on the Delta is not really a bonus. The Grizz has handwheels, which look cool. I'm not quite sure how the mechanism works on the Delta, but I notice that even their big daddy 12" job has some kind of lever flummy instead of handwheels. Looks like you loosen a nut and then use the lever to adjust the height. Looks a bit crude, judging from pictures. I'll have to go play with the display at Lowe's and check that aspect out.
Well, anyway, what else should I be thinking about here? I'm generally inclined more toward cash and carry than mail order, so that puts it at least 60% that I would grab the Delta. If the Grizz has a lot more to offer in the way of useful features or enhancements, however, I could be swayed to go that route. I reckon I could look at JET and stuff too.
(And yes, for those who will point this out, I realize I have umpty buttloads of medical bills coming in any day now. Thanks for reminding me, and it doesn't hurt to shop, dammit.)
While I'm at it, there's no place I can leave one of these beasts stationary in my bitty shop. I need to think about mobile bases that can move a ~250-pound cast iron behemoth around on a floor composed of irregular, sagging, warped sections of plywood. No two segments are the same height, and they all have some degree of flex. I might well break through some of them and have to think about redoing the floor, come to think of it. Pity the benchtop just didn't have enough fundamental jointeriness about it to do what I need to do with it.