I am trying to joint some 72" long Ash planks. I have a 6" Craftsman jointer (their benchtop model). I have jointed short pieces of hardwood, but these longer pieces are not working out so well. In fact I have ruined a very nice piece of wood.
Can someone explain the best way of jointing these longer boards to me? Buying a larger jointer is not an option at this point and I really want to use this beautiful Ash wood.
Thanks,
Assuming you really need your final pieces to be nearly 72" long and you are jointing for glueup and not flattening, a router with a straight bit run between the two pieces to be glued up will produce a perfect glue joint. Of course, you must clamp the two pieces to scrap so that they are about 1/8" to 1/4" less apart than the router bit width at the widest gap and use a straight edge clamped to the whole mess to guide the router so that 1/16" to 1/8" will be taken from each edge in one pass.
If your final dimensions are much less than 72", rough cut the work slightly longer than the final dimension before jointing.
-Doug
"A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul." - George Bernard Shaw
2) Remove high spots to approximate straight edge. I prefer to take the concave edge, remove the ends by straddling the knives near the middle, then joining out both ends. You can do convex edges, too, but they demand a bit of forbearance, You take short passes JUST over the middle, lifting before the ends.
3) Join the full edge.First, it isn't going to happen on a bench top jointer unless you get extremely lucky. So forget that. Rule of thumb for length of stock is 1 1/2 times the length of the bed.
The best way to accomplish the job if you do not have a jointer with sufficient bed length is to use a hand plane.
I also have a toy jointer. No way it will ever do 72". What I have done successfully with 50" (never tried longer) is to rip a edge, and then run it on the jointer set to 1/32nd. It works fine, assuming you have a table saw that cuts straight.
I've done this many a time on a 4' long, 6" jointer.
Use some sort of support at each end, like a roller stand. Remove the obvious high parts from either the convex or concave end by jointing only those areas, with the jointer or a hand plane. The last step is to joint the whole board.
Be very careful attempting to rip a curved board on the tablesaw. As different parts of the board touch the fence, ugly things can happen, in a hurry.
Barry
Good for you. If he had a 4' long jointer, he wouldn't need to ask advice.
With a "bed" length of 24" ?
Work a bit on theory, and you can pick up the practice on the jointer.
Thanks for the help everyone.
Tod E Weber
Ok, what ever the hell that means.
How short is this thing? By 4', I mean total, not each bed.
I thought I did provide some advice.
Barry
I believe the OP said he had a Craftsman benchtop model. If it's the one I'm thinking of it's even shorter than the Delta J160, which is 30" overall.
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