Ryobi 6″ jointer can’t joint a board
I have a ryobi 6″ mini jointer that I am trying to flatten the face of some boards on. I realize its a small tool and I probably shouldn’t expect much of it compared to a full size jointer but it seems like I should be able to flatten a few smaller workpieces on it. The blades have been replaced once and the current blades appear OK without any major knicks. The other day I was trying to flatten the face on a small chunk of rough sawn poplar. It was fairly flat to begin with just rough. I thought I should have been able to use 2 push blocks and make a few light passes to dress the edge. The result I got is that the front end only planes and midway through the workpiece will rock and I wind up with a severely concave useless workpeice. I checked to make sure that the blades are tangent at the top of their arc to the outfeed table and they are pretty close. One of them was a hair high and made the straight edge move as I hand rotated the cutterhead. Would this slight of a misalignment of the knives account for such poor performance? My other idea is that the cutterhead maybe isn’t cutting all the time and sort of runs out of steam. These little ryobi’s use a high pitched universal variable speed motor that I’m a bit suspicious of. At the time I bought this thing a few years ago I liked some its features and thought it seemed decently constructed. Could anyone advise me on how I’ve gone so wrong? Thanks for any replies.
Replies
do you mean a 'concave' workpiece? or more likly'convex'..the out feed table may have a nose down attitude at the farthest point from the cutter and as you pass far enough and switch pressure , the end follows the table and liffts away from the cutter.
Check witha long st. edge spanning both tables..they would like to be parallel..
let us know..
You're right , I'm making convex workpieces because the outfeed table slopes down. My "outfeed table" if it even deserves to be referred to one measures 13.375" long. The jointer is 28" from end to end. The outfeed has a stainless steel platen on it that is secured with flat head machine screws (7 of them). Just snugging these down with a phillips screwdriver is sufficient to let me see light under my Starrett 24" straightedge. When I bring the infeed up the zero and check the whole top for flatness there is a substantial dropoff visible at the far end of the outfeed platen. I slid a peice of .015" shim stock under that part of the platen and rechecked with the straight edge. Now there are some new places in the middle that aren't as flush but the far end is closer to being flush. I'll test a few boards now and get back with you with an update on whether I'm approaching "acceptible". My handplane skills can yield much better results than what I'm currently seeing!
Dang Sprocket, sounds like you have justification for a new jointer!Steve
"One of them was a hair high and made the straight edge move as I hand rotated the cutterhead. Would this slight of a misalignment of the knives account for such poor performance?" Maybe not this particular problem (convex product), but if you have one knife that's "a hair" above the other, I believe you're essentially working with a 1-knife cutterhead at that point. I was getting some rather poor results with my Jet jointer this past summer, and thought I needed to replace the blades, but it turned out they only needed adjusting. Once all three were equal in height, I got those nice smooth edges back.
forestgirl Another proud member of the "I Rocked With ToolDoc Club" .... :>) you can take the girl out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the girl ;-)
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