No, Really

A while back, I gave up and ordered a small planer/jointer. I had had problems face-jointing wood with my planer sled. You have to use hot glue to shim the wood in place, and it’s very easy to make mistakes, and you get problems. With a jointer, you just slap the wood onto the infeed table and push.

I cancelled the order later, after I got better at using the planer. Then I placed the order again. Aggravation is cumulative.

Today it arrives. I can’t wait to see if it works. This is the last major tool purchase I will need to make in order to have what I consider to be an adequate home shop.

For woodworking, you need a drill press, a table saw, a router in a table, a handheld router, a planer, a jointer, and some sanding equipment. Otherwise, you’re feeble. Without a planer, you can’t create parallel sides on boards. Without a jointer, it’s a pain to create flat sides and perpendicular edges. Without a drill press, your holes will be all over the place. If you don’t have a router in a table, you will go insane building jigs to do precision routing. If you don’t have a handheld router, you will go insane trying to rout things you can’t see. If you don’t have sanding equipment, you might as well kill yourself. Imagine sanding things by hand.

A drum sander would be a nice thing to have, but it’s not as important as a jointer. I can create a nearly finish-ready surface with my planer in a few seconds, and the final sanding is easy with my current tools, so I can do most of the things a drum sander does, without too much grief.

A band saw is also very important, unless you never plan to resaw anything or make a curved cut. Band saws are extremely useful, even though the level of precision is pretty bad.

I don’t know if I made a good choice. I could have gotten a great used 8″ jointer on Craigslist, but I wanted to be able to joint 10″ boards without resorting to some kind of pathetic jury-rigged jig. And a conventional jointer would have been huge. Oddly, the machine I got is very compact and has a mobile base. You would think a 10″ jointer would be enormous, but I guess there’s a lot of leeway in the design process.

I hate to say it, but Europeans are way ahead of us when it comes to woodworking. For example, their table saws are just plain superior. And they love small jointer/planers. A Swiss company named Inca used to make one that was very, very popular and highly respected. They quit, but now many companies sell machines based on the Inca. Mine is an example. If you go to Amazon UK, you’ll see lots of jointer/planers made by well-known companies including DeWalt. It’s a proven concept, but Americans haven’t caught on.

I don’t know why Americans are losing the woodworking race. We can’t even find the right names for machines. An American planer is really a thicknesser. An American jointer is really a planer. If you search for jointer/planers on European sites, they won’t turn up, because Europeans know the difference between planing and thicknessing.

“Planing” means to create a flat plane. A planer won’t do that! Crazy. A planer creates a board with a uniform thickness, using the bottom side as a reference. If the bottom of the board is bowed, the “planed” board will be bowed. Crooked in, crooked out.

A jointer will put a flat plane on one side of a board, but it won’t get it ready for making a joint, because the thickness won’t necessarily be uniform.

To make a usable piece of wood, you have to plane one side using the jointer and then use the planer to make the other side parallel to it. Then you have something flat to hold against the jointer fence while you plane (or joint or whatever) the edges of the board. How do you get the edges parallel? I have no idea. The jointer only does one edge, and when you flip the board and do the other edge, there is no reason to expect the two edges to come out parallel. I guess I’d use the table saw, with the jointed edge against the fence.

Anyway, I look forward to getting the new machine. Sometimes buying a tool can turn 4-hour jobs into 2-hour jobs, and this is a good example of such a tool.

By the way, the milling machine has turned out to be indispensable for woodworking. It automatically does things that otherwise require jigs, rulers, clamps, glue, and prayer, not to mention considerable skill. If you do precision joinery with small parts, a small mill will be a godsend.

I’m so grateful to God for giving me the stuff I need to make use of the creativity he gave me. Creativity without tools is torment.

I hope to hear that truck pulling up shortly.