Making Perpendicular Wood Edges

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Kevin and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to talk about the next step in the wood machining process. Now that we're done with the planer, we've established two faces parallel to one another, the next step is getting an edge perpendicular to both those faces, so for that, we come back to this machine, the jointer. At this point, we want to make sure that this fence is perfectly perpendicular to the bed here. We've got a nice machine square here, and what we're going to do, we set it on the table here, press it up against the fence and as you can see, we're nice and perfectly square. If you weren't, they have these machine knobs back here, you would loosen and adjust, there's usually a set screw, a positive stop for perpendicular cut and so you would just to need adjust, run some test pieces and get it perfectly dialed-in. But we've spent the time doing that today, so we're ready to go. As with last time we were here, we want to take a look at the board and we've got this piece slightly cupped that way which is fine and the grain is running downhill this way, so with that in mind, we're going to put this side down with the grain running downhill, that way when we make the cut, we're going to hopefully be completely tear-out free and get a nice, smooth, straight edge that is perpendicular to both sides. Since I can see here, I got about a little bit more than a sixteenth to take off, so I'm going to set the depth of cut here, which they'll be on most jointers, there is a knob here that you simply loosen and tighten which will adjust the bit up and down, and so I'm going to loosen it a little bit to take more of a cut because right now we're taking off maybe a sixty-forth. So right now I'm almost at a sixteenth, which is a deep cut, but will slow down the number of passes that we have. Sometimes it can take three or more passes and that's fine, but if you can set the depth a little deeper, it will save you a little bit of time. One again, what we want to do is we want to loosen this fence up here and slide it over to where we're only using as much cutter head as we need and that way the rest of this cover up machine, thus increasing the safety of the usage. Now with that setup, what we're going to do, be sure to put on your headphones and then run it over the machine and get an edge perpendicular to both of those faces. We've made the cut and we've now established an edge that is perpendicular to both faces. Just to be sure, it?s always a good idea to take a square and to check it. As you can see, we are perfectly perpendicular to both sides."