Using a Jointer

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Kevin and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you how to properly use the jointer to get wood flat on one face and then from there to take it to the jointer and have another side parallel to it in a process of getting our wood square and perpendicular on all side. We've got our solid wood here and we've determined that we want joint this side going down based on the bow in the wood and we've got our jointer set to where we don't have a lot of extra knife exposed, so when we go over it, its going to be a nice, safe cut. Not a lot of exposed blades so that we can do this and when you're pushing it over the jointer, you're going to be pushing with everything on this bed, but as soon as you get enough of the board on this side, you really want to concentrate the weight and pushing it on this side because this is where the board is coming out, the new surface is being established and you want to go with that and let he knives do its work and cut off the rest on the of the board. When you've turned on this machine, you'll see that I'll start out on this side and quickly I'll be pushing and concentrating all my effort with my hands on this side where the new surface is being established. Whenever you use this machine, it?s really important to be able to have headphones and to use them. Although not the loudest machine in the shop, over time it will do damage to your hearing, so almost with every machine, it?s a really good idea to have a good set of headphones, especially for very loud machines like the planer. For this one, very good idea to use headphones. Ok, so now we've used the jointer and we've established a flat face on one side of the board and we're given a nice piece of walnut here that we're able to start seeing the grain here and part of the reason that we're able to see this so good, is we ran the board in the same direction as the grain is running on this board and we've got a nice smooth surface with no tear-out. Part of that is because we ran it in the same direction as the grain and that we've got a nice set of sharp knives which you always want to use on all machines as the knives get dull, it can become a safety hazard. If you've got good cutting tools, it?s really going to help the machine and less work you have to do later on with repairing things like tear-out. We've established this flat surface and it?s important to remember that when you're running it over the jointer, you don't have to get an entirely clean surface as we've done here. As long as you've got about 70 to 80 percent of it jointed and its sitting flat on a good flat surface that we can test out here, then you know you've done your job. Its feeling flat, I'm not getting any bows or its not rocking anywhere, so we know we've downs our job. From here, the next step is we're going to do and go and put it through the planer and we're going to establish this side parallel to the flat side we have over here."