Ridgid, Grizzly, or other 6" Jointer?

"dadiOH" wrote in news:n9o945$ou0$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

OK, I'm a little confused here - how is that different from running a board thru a planer? Seems like it would make it smooth but not flat.

John

Reply to
John McCoy
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Obviously confused. Did he mention anything about a planer? I don't believe that he said any thing about a drum sander being better suited than a planer. He simply said, I can and do get a flat face with his drum sander.

But to answer your question, the drum sander pretty much will do what a planer will do except at a much slower pace. Given that, a rum sander has many advantages over a planer.

Reply to
Leon

I don't have a planer, never used one but I suspect it is the same...

Run board through, concave side down to make convex side flat. Turn over, run through to make concave side flat (and parallel).

Leon mentioned that drum sanders are slower and I imagine so. Still,I have a couple of hundred feet of mahogany I have been surfacing as needed and I can take off 1/16 per pass with #40 paper. Fast enough for me and no tear out :)

Reply to
dadiOH

What model drum sander do you have? I have a Performax 22-44 with a relatively fine grit compared to 40 but wow 1/16" in a pass is pretty aggressive by my standards. :~) And thinking I should get some 40 grit paper. I use my 15" planer when I need to do a lot but more often than not the drum sander is adequate for small batches.

Reply to
Leon

I've got a 16/32 Performax, only 1 HP (not sure what the 22/44 has), but with a 36 grit belt I'll cut a 1/2 turn (1/32) per pass. I would hesitate to go deeper. One _big_ difference between a planer and drum is the drum has (comparatively) weaker hold down rollers and any bowing on boards longer than 2x the sanders bed width will leave divots (snipe).

-BR

Reply to
Brewster

...

I suppose with the little lunchbox planers, they may not have enough hold down force to not, but a "real" planer will (and a lunchbox has to, at least to a degree) take any bow out, smooth the top surface as it goes through, then the bow will come back out the other side.

A jointer, otoh, takes the high spots off and leaves one with a flat surface _first_. _THEN_ one runs that face down through the planer and ends up with voila!! a flat and parallel-faced piece of stock.

Reply to
dpb

And that is the correct way to do it. But a planer can take the bow out if the wood is sent through with a flat sled and several wedges under the "bowed up" spots to prevent the planer from bending/flatenning the wood out.

But I have to say WHAT A PAIN IN THE BUTT! It works well but the process is labor intensive, especially with long boards. You have to grab the sled and the work as a unit and run tem through several times. Heavy work by comparison to no sled.

Reply to
Leon

I believe I have 120 or 150 grit on my sander. I typically go a quarter turn between passes.

I typically use the sander over the planer when I am dealing with wonky grain. The sander is not going to present any tear out issues like a planer will.

Additionally the big stationary planers, mine at least, have steel in feed rollers with ridges to grab the wood. If you do not take off enough material the in feed will leave shallow indentations in the wood.

I would have to guess this is if I am removing less than 1/64". It is best to plan your last pass through the planer so that you are removing a relatively measurable amount. Obviously the softer the wood the more likely this is going to happen. I installed a digital depth gauge to make sneaking up on the last pass a little easier.

Reply to
Leon

...

Yabbut...

I'd use a hand scrub plane first...for _a_ board.

It's why I keep both planers and rue not having brought that large jointer altho I did finally break down and the last batch of maple I bought I paid for initial surfacing as it is almost all wider than 8" which the jointer here won't handle in a single pass...

I may just check if TVA did ever get rid of it or whether it's still just sitting there -- might just have to take the truck next time go to visit the kids/grandkids!!! :)

Reply to
dpb

Performax 16-32. The 1/16" is depending...how wide, how hard, how even (in thickness, wind, etc.). Oak, probably not; poplar, sure.

At the moment, I am skinnying down some mahogany so I can see the grain so I can make a support knee for wife's makeup table (the last thing for the vanities). One piece is 10 1/2 wide, the others 6 1/2+-. I had 80 grit on the machine, didn't want to change it so I'm just taking 1/32 per pass. With 40 grit I am pretty sure I could do 1/16" even though one of the narrow boards had some wind in it.

The four grits I use are 40, 80, 120 and 180. With 120, I only do 1/48 per pass, with 180, 1/64. I have no problem skipping grits...40 to 120, eg, or

80 to 180. I get full rolls from Econ-Abrasives.
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Reply to
dadiOH

The boards I'm doing now (see reply to Leon) are about 7 1/2' long. Two have mild bowing. No snipe.

As I run the board through, more is taken on the ends from the side bowed up, more from the center from the side bowed down; final result is flat or close to. Once cut to final length (44") and finish sanded, all bow will be gone. It functions like that because I made extendible, variable, in/out feed supports. On the bowed up side, the weight of the board keeps the leading and trailing edges of the board a bit high; consequently, more is taken off; conversely for the other side.

If the hold down rollers aren't properly adjusted, one will get snipe regardless of the board length.

Reply to
dadiOH

I'm glad I have the drum sander :)

Reply to
dadiOH

On 02/14/2016 10:57 AM, dadiOH wrote: ...

They're nice, indeed...in Lynchburg had access to a large (30") dual-drum unit but never did invest in one of the home-shop Performax or similar...would be nice, however, granted...

But, I get by... :)

Reply to
dpb

Sounds about right per my findings....

I bought from

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I would not be supervised if they were both one in the same. They are from the same metro area of Dallas TX

I do see that they have dropped their web pricing.

Reply to
Leon

Is that electric??? ;~) I did notice "a" board.

I do not do enough to warrant going further at this point. I hand pick my S4S material. BUT several years ago I bought 200 BF of rough cut red and white oak and flattened it on the sled and planer. Never again. ;~) I do not enjoy the process of turning rough lumber into "ready to use" lumber.

Reply to
Leon

As do I. I use it more often that I ever though I would. Great for veneers, wood with crazy grain, and I always use it after resawing lumber. With all of those 3D boxes I built late last year the drum sander saw a lot of work.

Like most any tool you find more uses for it when you actually have it in the shop. Otherwise you use some other method that might be more tedious. My Domino is a perfect example of a tool that wildly exceeded my expectations of how much I would use it.

Reply to
Leon

I think "if" I replaced mine I might look at the SuperMax, IIRC. IIRC Jet bought Performax several years ago, just after I bought my Performax, and sell it under the Jet and Powermatic name now. IIRC the Jet was identical except for the name to my Performax

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And the prettied up Performax. IIRC the insides are pretty much like the Jet. ALTHOUGH Jet does offer the oscillating version too.

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The SuperMax has 2 drums on some models

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As I commented in a previous post, when they are available your find more uses. I forgot to mention in another post that I used it to tweak the fit of small short/shallow drawers by sanding the top edges and bottom edges on the drum sander.

Anyway.........

Reply to
Leon

...

Indeed. Deliberately stated as you noticed... :)

I got in the habit when in VA and there were all those little one-man sawmills everywhere that could get gorgeous stuff from at "giveaway" prices. Oak (any kind, sawn however wanted, just pick it out) was 10 cents, walnut 15-20 and cherry up to 25 for really wide stuff...

Later, when wasn't so handy in TN I bought just 2C of whatever I wanted as the most economical choice. I moved most of a (small bobtail) truckload when we came back of a mix of oak, walnut, hard maple, some butternut and a smattering of a lot of other stuff collected over 30 years.

When doing windows for the barn, however, I could _not_ find any 5/4 clear white pine at the time as it was in the big housing boom time and everything was being bought up by Andersen, Pella, etc., or being exported. So, I bought the soft maple for the purpose through the mill shop in Wichita that did the replacement siding and bed mould I needed for me. I did let them surface one side of it plus some 8" SYP I bought from which to pick through to find trim pieces so I do have one flat starting side on it.

The rest of everything here at the moment is all roughsawn, though.

Reply to
dpb

I will chime in here since I have the Ridgid jointer.

In general, I am very happy with mine. It runs and cuts smoothly. The bed is long enough that you can really create a straight edge on a board. The bed height and the fence position adjustment are simple and straight forward. It came out of the box with the infeed and outfeed tables parallel. The tables are flat. (There is a minor 0.002 inch dip on one far corner of the infeed table but that is definitely not a problem since there is plenty of flat table before you get to the cutter head.)

My only complaint is that the adjustment for the tilt of the fence seems a little strange to me. (This is my first and only jointer so I do not have any other data points for comparison.) The tilt adjustment articulates at a couple of points so that the fence can move up and down while adjusting the tilt. Since I wanted a small gap between the fence and the table tops, I used a piece of card stock to position the fence vertically while adjusting the tilt. I set it to 90 degrees when I first got the jointer and I have not changed it since.

I bought the jointer is 2009. At that time it was listed at $428. I decided to buy it when Home Depot was having a 1/2 price sale. (I think that the reason for the sale was that this is when Home Deopt decided to no longer stock the jointers in the store.) I thought that $214 was a fair price. When I got to the store, the price that they charged me was $107 plus tax. I asked and they checked and that was the price that they had in their computer. The sales guy asked me if I wanted the second unit that they had in stock. I did not have room for a second unit and it was a good price but I declined.

Dan

Reply to
Dan Coby

On 02/14/2016 12:54 PM, Leon wrote: ...

I know I've told the story before that when first got to Lynchburg where there were TREES!!!! for heaven's sake!! and got the real ww'ing bug that had been mildly planted in HS shop, first ran into a kid just out of HS at the time making decoupage plaques on a one-at-a-time basis with a little Craftsman shaper and hand sander. Mr Davis of Davis Paint, a regional manufacturer there was selling them in their retail store downtown for him and he was earning enough (with a lot of time invested) to keep himself in school at least part time with a new wife, to boot.

Mr Davis offered to bankroll him a shop and it was answering his ad in the Sunday paper to sell the shaper and the Powermatic planer that I met him. Mr Davis upgraded him and set him up a shop in the 2nd basement under the store (there were two more below it, 12-ft ceilings, dry, well-lit, _great_ shop space) with a two-spindled shaper, the 24" PM planer and a stroke sander.

Within five years, Eddie was running 40,000 bd-ft thru the shop in a single year, primarily at that time doing the wooden platforms for Craddock-Terry shoe company there in Lynchburg. At that time the plaque business had fallen off but the remnant of it was access to the drum sander when I wanted...

The sander was an old Smith unit Mr Davis got from Lane on a swap; iirc it was 20hp. Initially there wasn't enough dust collection and things got real messy the first time we turned it on! :)

Reply to
dpb

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