Testing The Cheapest Jointer on Amazon

welcome back to the shop friends today we're testing out the cheapest joiner on amazon this is the craftsman six inch bench top jointer the part number for this tool is cmew020 and i paid 322 dollars for this tool about a month ago and it was at that time the cheapest joiner on amazon before we jump into the tool if you're new here my name is jim and this is a lasting build channel i have almost three years of woodworking content here on the channel and most recently i built an acoustic guitar that'd be awesome if you wanted to check it out let's start out by taking a look at the build materials in the footprint of the tool the tool length is approximately 30 inches and the tool width this would be the footprint of the tool is approximately 18 and a half inches six inches is the total width of the blades on the tool the tool appears to be mostly aluminum it has an aluminum fence most of the body is aluminum it does have some plastic components to it it has rubber feet on it there is holes in the jointer to attach it to your workbench the table top surface of the jointer is cast aluminum the jointer can be adjusted by turning these plastic knobs and you can move the fence front and back as you can see the fence can be brought almost completely to the front of the table of the jointer in addition to moving the fence front and back you can also change the angle of the fence and by turning this plastic knob you can even set a miter like this using the fence fence is pretty easy to square by just using a square on the top and against the fence and then turning the knob and tightening it i've got the tool unplugged the tool does come with two cutter blades and these are not i do not believe these blades can be sharpened there's four allen bolts there that lock those into place there's also this locking mechanism for when you want to change the blades that way the cutter head is not trying to spin on you when you're trying to change those blades out replacement blades for this tool are available and i'll put a link to those in the description you do have some adjustability in the depth of cut for the joiner and here it shows that you can go from essentially zero cut up to 1 8 of an inch of cut now to adjust the depth of cut you just loosen this lock knob and then you turn this knob at the bottom and that changes the depth of cut i have so far been using it and taking literally as small of a bite as possible i don't feel like overworking the tool has been necessary for for my use so far i've just been taking very small shavings off and that's kind of where i've had it set if you're working with soft woods and you have a lot of material to remove then you could certainly take a thicker shaving off of the pieces of wood you do have adjustability for the rpms of the blades that are turning and you have a knob here for adjusting here is the red safety switch the tool does come with this dust collection hookup and it actually works perfectly with this powertech four inch to two and a quarter inch reducer fitting this is the same fitting that i've been using on my table saw the adapter fits perfectly into the inlet here and then this can be connected to a four inch hose for your dust collection system the tool also came with two push pads depending on where you live it might be important to know that the plug is three prong and it's also wired at 120 volts so let's put the tool through some paces so you can see how it works this is a scrap piece of 2x4 the 2x4 has a cup in it and it also has a twist in it so that's a little bit easier for you guys to see i'm going to mark it up with a pencil that way we can tell where the blades are cutting the material at i like to use sort of a grid pattern like this it makes it really easy to see exactly where we're cutting so this is a soft piece of wood so i'm going to go ahead and turn it up on its highest speed which is on the fifth setting here then i'm going to go ahead and adjust our cut to 1 16 of an inch since it is a very soft wood so i've got all my safety gear here we're going to make a few passes through the joiner and then i'll show you kind of what it looks like as it cuts [Music] [Music] so that was only two passes through the joiner and that was at a sixteenth of an inch we were probably taking a little bit too much material off but because it was a soft wood i thought it would be okay so we could have easily taken off less material at a time and it would probably put less strain on the machine but it did just fine so now let's test it for flatness i hope you can see in the camera but there is not any light going through between the straight edge and the piece of wood i'm doing it from corner to corner and then corner to corner and we can test it side to side as well and that looks really really good so now that we have a perfectly flat face now i want to put a nice reference edge on it and i want that edge to be 90 degrees to the face so i'm going to put the flat face up against the fence and then run the edge through the jointer [Music] so there's that perfectly flat edge there i changed my depth and i was just taking just the smallest sliver that i could off so i made probably six passes for the edge but you can see how nicely flat that is and then we can use our straight edge our straight edge to check it here and you shouldn't really see any light going through between the straight edge and the material that looks really good now let's take a square and check to see how square our fence is to the to the bed of the of the machine it's going to be hard for you to see in the camera but that looks uh looks really really good so no problems for the 2x4 right i think it did a really really nice job look at that perfectly crisp edge on that 2x4 from just a few passes through the jointer so the next board i'm going to show you is a piece of oak this is a half inch piece of oak and it has a cup in it a little bit of twist in it and i actually took a couple passes a few minutes ago and you can see where my grid is just left in the middle and the blades have been cutting on the outside so let's go ahead and take this to the jointer a few more times and see if we can get it perfectly flat i think you can see here it did really well with that oak i just made two more passes and i don't see any light making it through between the straight edge and the material and just siding down the board i don't see any evidence of cupping or twist we can also lay the straight edge on there like that and check for flatness side to side on the board it looks perfect the next board i'm going to show you is a piece of honduran mahogany and this is clear grain mahogany that i'm going to use to build a ukulele neck and you can see it's about two foot long and it's about an inch and a half thick and it's pretty it's pretty square already but i can see it's got just a very subtle cupping to it and maybe just a hair twist so i'm going to run this through here this is the longest board we've done so far and i'm going to run it through the joiner to see how well it does [Music] i only made one pass and it essentially moved all of the pencil marks off of that piece so it must be really flat already but i hope you can see that the tool had no problem with the mahogany and mahogany is a very hard wood it is pretty easy to plane it's pretty easy to hand plane as well so it's a really really nice material to work with but yeah it's it's very very flat using the straight edge so final thoughts on this tool uh it's a budget tool it's built to a price point it's not made with really quality materials but it does do it does do a good job for small small pieces of wood like what i've used here today we put through pine we put through oak and a hundred mahogany it did fine with all of those i haven't changed the blades yet um i've been using it for about a month now it's done just perfect i'm not exactly sure where i'm going to put it in the shop yet so i haven't hooked it up the dust collection and i haven't screwed it down to the bench probably going to put it back here in the back but i think it's a pretty good tool for the price i mean you can't beat the price this is certainly not a tool that i would recommend for big projects big pieces of wood i think this is sort of the tool that for the smaller things the smaller items that you're you're milling up in your shop definitely if you're if you're cutting logs and you're milling up big pieces of wood i would recommend a much bigger joiner but i think this type of joiner this bench top joiner has a place in a lot of our shops and i think it's going to come in really handy here in my shop as always i'll put a link in the description for the tool and i'll also put a link in the description for the replacement blades and i'll also put a link for the dust collection hookup that's made by powertech this is not sponsored or anything i hope this video is helpful for you thanks for watching and i'll see you on the next video

Channel: LastingBuild

Views: 138,393

Keywords: woodworking tools, tool ideas, workshop ideas, woodworking workshop ideas, woodworking jointer, woodworking tools I need

Id: jdGdQfnCmQk

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021