Homemade Shopmade Jointer

Over the past month I’ve been building an adaption of Mathias Wandel’s jointer (check it out on YouTube if you haven’t seen it). He used a lot of cheap material, as the purpose of his build was an economical one. Doing a bunch of research I gathered ideas I liked from other builds and combined them all into my build. Realizing the sole purpose of a Jointer is to flatten stock, I wasn’t comfortable having the jointer beds being made of laminated baltic birch ply. So I purchased a set of SawStop Extension Wings, grinded a 45 degree bevel (to fit over the Cutter Head). There’s another guy that also used the SawStop Extension wings in a bit of a different way. Almost the entire machine is built from Baltic Birch ply and Cherry (used what I had and it’s a stable wood).

Since I ended up using the jointer beds and not building them, the plans I purchased from Mathias become more of a visual guide. So this was a build as I go project, so there were some hiccups and things I would do in a different order if I knew exactly where the cut would be. There was a lot of trial and error, taking the beds on and off after taking measurements as I wanted the beds as close to the cutterhead as possible.

I realize some people may question the stability of the machine or question why I spent the time building and they would have just bought one. In reality, a 12” jointer with these bed lengths (a little over 60” total length) would be way outside of my price range. The cutterhead cost me nothing (already had it) and I returned a bunch of stuff to Harbor Freight that basically paid for the motor (could have also used the universal motor that I pulled from the same planer I got the cutterhead from, but they are loud). So I’m in for the materials ($90) belt and pulleys $17 and the Extension Wings I used for the beds $180 for a total of $287 spent on this project. Not bad.

The frame is made of laminated plywood, 1 baltic birch and one A/B plywood, totalling around 19 ply Plenty strong enough and should provide for negligible movement in the shop.

Getting through the cast iron was interesting, but a grinder with fresh cut off wheels got the job done. Was a bit nervous cutting through $180 investment!

Probably overkill, but I doubled the parallelgram links, made from baltic birch and did three rows instead of 2 like in the plans.

This shows how the infeed and outfeed will be attached, laminated 3/4” cherry on each side, bolted down through 4 holes, again overkill but gave me piece of mind as these bolts will carry the weight of the force that I use to push the stock down and through the cutterhead, so I don’t want any movement.

I ended up getting an induction motor from HF, 1.5 HP at 3600 RPM, much much quieter than the motor in the planer. The pulley’s are right about 3:1 ratio given me around 10000 RPM at the cutterhead. Because of this, Mathias belt tensioning system wouldn’t work so I devised a half sliding dovetail system for mine. Seems to work well, minimal belt vibration. Overall, the extra weight on the frame and of course the infeed/outfeed tables being cast iron, the vibration is very minimal, something I was worried about.