Hacking the Harbor Freight 4" Biscuit Joiner!

hey guys and welcome back to 80 garage and by guys i definitely meet all seven of my family and friends that are watching this video as a favor to me thanks so i started posting videos early in 2020 and then 2020 happened and i didn't post anymore so this year i set myself a goal 2021 i was going to release a new video each month and by the end of the year i wanted to have a thousand subscribers because i'm taping this on february 1st i have already missed my goal so i hope to make up for that through the rest of the year i'm working on these organizer cabinets and i want to complete them as inexpensively and quickly as possible i didn't have 200 to spend on a name brand biscuit joiner so i went to harbor freight and i picked up this one for about 55 this is an okay biscuit joiner they used to sell a model that had a plastic fence and it was awful so this one has a nice die cast fence and overall it works pretty well but pretty well wasn't good enough to give me consistent results where i had a perfect overhang on each side now if you were joining a lot of boards that were the same thickness you could probably get away with this in stock form but i needed something a little bit better so i decided i could modify this and take out most of the inaccuracies in it so i'm going to show you with a couple tricks a tap and a drill bit what i did and what i would change i also took some time to design these which are small spacers that clip onto the fence and allow you to quickly change between a 14 millimeter thick piece of wood and a 12 millimeter thick piece of wood so let me show you how i did it [Music] alright so let's take a look at what i did first things first the fence here and the plunge mechanism were the main issues both of them as you can see are fairly well machined there's a couple rough spots that you would expect but overall they're not too bad the biggest problem that i saw was that this could move side to side and when you would tighten this knob down to set the fence in place the whole thing would twist a little bit so the first thing that i wanted to try was if i could take that play out by pushing this fairly well machined dovetail joint into this side a little bit more now yes some of you are going to say that if i push the fence side to side i move the center of this out of alignment well i'll step ahead for a second i did push this this way and this the other way to try and account for that so either way what i ended up with was something that was out probably half a millimeter so i wasn't too concerned about it because on a biscuit joint you have a little bit of side to side play with the biscuit so it's not a big deal so first things first what i did was i measured to the center of this i'm going to call this a dovetail or this guide and drilled a hole there what i found interesting when i did this was that this hole where the knob threads in is not exactly centered on this machined flat i thought that was interesting because what it does is it serves to move or cause a little bit of misalignment when you tighten it down now in the future i think i may actually fill this hole and re-drill it so that it's dead centered just like this one i think that may help me a little bit and actually one of the other things that i did which i think helps a little bit is i took this i don't know if you can see it but i made sure that this top part was flat and then ground it down a little bit so the contact point was a little bit smaller so i'm sure all of you are looking at this and saying oh my goodness there's an 832 bolt sticking out of the side of this that steel bolt is going to dig into this fence and ruin it in short order well actually what i did is i took a piece of petg that was two millimeters thick and i'm using that as the wear surface so in the end what i would like to do is i would like to get some nylon set screws that can go in these and be completely captured let me take this completely off so you can see what those petg uh screws look like but their pieces look like so you can see it there i think right there that's a piece of black petg that i've printed on my 3d printer and that is actually serving as a softer wear surface obviously than this so i certainly don't want to put steel right through there and you can also see like i said that misalignment of this knob so i think if i were to fill this with jb weld and drill it dead center like that this may be even better but in the end when i put this down there and actually because it's smashed into the rail uh there is actually some positive engagement there and i'll show you how much easier or how much less play there is there is no play when i move that around now yes it is a little bit difficult to move up and down because i have smashed that plastic piece into this however that's okay i don't want that to be tremendously easy to move because if it's very easy then it'll just slide around when you're trying to set it so what i've done and you'll see i put that in place now i'll tighten this to avoid this from moving and then i'll tighten this down and basically what i've done is now we've applied even pressure and this now is set at exactly this height so this is my reference this is where i'm going to go so i've set all of my add-on spacers off of 19 millimeters so i'll talk about these a little bit more later but these can be any thickness you want obviously up until your reference block so they'll get thicker or thinner depending upon the stock that you want to cut the groove in and it'll perfectly center it in here so the next thing that i did was since that worked i took and i drilled two holes and tapped them here the same plastic piece inside of these so i've pressed that down into the holes and then these thread in now you'll see i did make a little bit of a mistake here what i did not realize is that the rail on the inside that this slides on i thought it ended here right here and it actually ends right here so i drilled a great hole i put a dead center and only after i slid this into place did i realize uh oh the rail stops back here and it slips off and it wouldn't be an issue if i had those nylon set screws but because i'm using a small piece on top of the screw it would fall out when it got up here and it would jam and here let me show you the plunge a nice smooth plunge and no play in this fence anymore so before what was happening was the whole machine would tip like this and like this so you'd get a very inaccurate cut and you can see on this piece i was testing and making sure i was completely centered and one of the things that i was having was even just repeated cuts i was moving slightly up and down and now that doesn't happen at all so you'll see that in the final part where i show you a couple cuts on this and how easy it is to switch in between now one other thing that i did out of necessity is when i was removing this depth stop bolt there was some epoxy or something on this bolt and getting it out was extremely difficult i had a i had to use an impact driver to get it out so i pretty much ruined the screw so i just re-tapped this with the same bolt for the same machine screw and put a couple washers in and made sure that it was adjusted properly i don't know why they would have put epoxy on this because with epoxy on it you can't adjust the depth in the future if the blade stick out is wrong let's say you buy a different brand blade or something like that i mean they should be the same but if they aren't you have no adjustment um so i thought that was a little bit strange now one final thing that i did when i got this i noticed that this slide plate here was not a hundred percent even with the bottom of this fence so on a biscuit joiner you're referencing the bottom and there's a little bit of a tip on this so it's not perfectly machined flat but at the very least i wanted that edge right here to be completely flush with this plate this plate was actually a little bit this way maybe you know a quarter of a millimeter half a millimeter something like that and all i did and this this plate comes off because when you take this off this is how you replace the blade all i did was take this off and put two layers of masking tape on it now there's no guarantee that it's going to be off for your biscuit joiner but for mine it was i easily could have printed uh with my 3d printer a shim here that was the exact thickness that i wanted but the tape is working just fine and i've made probably 50 cuts 50 biscuit slots with this and you know there's no issue with that so that is a perfectly fine solution you don't necessarily have to do it because if you're cutting stock that's thinner than three quarters or well if it's any different dimension than three quarters this isn't going to slide anyway the reference to the center of the blade on all biscuit joiners is you know is meant for a piece of three quarter inch stock 19 millimeter stock for the rest of the world but if you're cutting anything that's different this doesn't really matter but for me i wanted to change it i i wanted to make sure that it was flat and flush so that when i did cut three quarter i could eliminate any tipping of the biscuit joiner itself so i mentioned in the beginning the video and i showed you these a little bit before but what these are is they are spacers that allow you to switch quickly and easily between different thicknesses of stock so i printed these out of petg on my ender 3 printer and there's a small ridge here that allows it to slide into place and positively lock for you i will put the files for these on thingiverse um i'll only put the 12 and the 14 up there to start with but these can be modified for any thickness that's three quarters of an inch or less so they basically what i did is i made the reference to the three quarter inch 19 millimeter piece of stock and then everything below that could have one of these made so why don't i show you a couple cuts and how easy it is to snap these on and snap these off i'll put the 12 millimeter one on and take the 12 millimeter off and put the 14 millimeter on very easy very fast i'll likely make these for some imperial sizes the 12 millimeter uh after i worked on this a little bit i realized that this is not a true half inch it's 12 millimeter and uh half an inch is actually 12.7 millimeters but they work perfectly i'll show you a couple cuts [Music] so there you have it a couple simple modifications to an inexpensive biscuit joiner that help you to get the best performance for the dollar out of it with just eight or so dollars for a drill and tap set some 3d printing magic and 99 cents for these machine screws we ended up with a biscuit joiner that performs much better than when it started and it didn't cost us a lot or take us a lot of time to do it so if you like this content it's only my third video let me know in the comments if it was good if it was bad if you want to see more things like this most of my content is automotive focused right now i've got some 3d printing stuff and i'd like to make all of that kind of stuff in the future like subscribe and comment below and we'll see you next time on the 80 [Music] garage [Music] you

Channel: 80% Garage

Views: 2,206

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Id: UNImpybCXIM

Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021