Monday, October 1, 2007

Assembly completed...

I left off in my last post with a gathering of jointer components which needed to be re-assembled. Over the past day or two I have been re-assembling the new ( to me) jointer. I did most of this work myself and after having done some careful analysis, I realized there was only one way to successfully perform the assembly. I slowly built up the jointer while it was inverted.. The critical phase of assembly is joining the two halves of the table, the infeed, outfeed, and cutterhead assemblies. Since the pieces are solid cast iron and extremely heavy, this was done while the pieces were inverted and raised off the floor with some boards and in perfect alignment with each other. I attached the outfeed and infeed portions of the table after lubricating the moving parts, rods and ways. At this point, the jointer table or main assembly is very heavy, so it stayed put while I built up the base.

Once the main components, the table and base , were assembled together, the next step was to right the jointer from inverted. At this point the jointer is in stripped down form, without the motor, magnetic switch, rabbet ledge, fence assembly , etc. I had help to right it and afterwards installed the electrical cables, motor assembly, fence assembly, rabbeting ledge, knobs, cutterhead guard, etc. After moving it into its final spot, I set up the chip collection piping and ducting for the new jointer. A few adjustments later, and success! It joints wide boards very well, feels solid, and isn't very noisy.