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While I have had some success edge jointing with the table saw, a jointer has been on my wish list for some time. For example, I wish I could have one, I wish I could afford one, and I wish I had room for one. Given my limited space and need for tool mobility and tool storage in order to park the cars in the garage, I have considered various options on how to get the optimum results in the minimum space. I believe an 8” jointer would provide me with a significant amount of capability, but an 8” jointer would be the largest I could accommodate in my shop provided it is equipped with a mobile base for storage. However, while I save up, I have also toyed with the idea of a small 6” jointer for edge jointing and a planer sled for face jointing. In addition, a good planer sled that works would also be useful for boards wider than 8” even if I eventually get an 8” jointer. I gave a lot of thought to the idea of a planer sled that I could use in my 12” Dewalt planer. I visualized a system like the toys we had as kids with the matrix of pins, we could put our hand or face into the pins and the pins would create a profile of whatever we pushed into them. In similar fashion I contemplated a matrix of screws that I could adjust up and down to fit the profile of the board but could not get over the complexity and time consumption of adjusting the screws to match the board surface profile. I imagined a series of wedges that I could install along the length of the board to support the twisted or cupped portions of the board but never quite settled in my mind a good way to keep the wedges from moving and could not get over the shear number of different wedges I would need to accommodate all possible scenarios and keep the wedges contained so they would not protrude out beyond the side of the sled. As I researched planer sleds on the web, I came across a video with an ingenious approach by Keith Rust based on an article from Fine Woodworking that used the idea of a wedge as an inclined plane to adjust several leveling cleats along the length of the board. This approach contained the wedges completely within the footprint of the planer sled, used screws for a positive lock between the wedges and the leveling cleats, and used non-skid tape on the top of the leveling cleats and the bottom of the wedges to mitigate slipping. Once I saw Keith’s videoI knew this was something I had to try out.
I built the main planer sled with torsion box construction using
Season of shop upgrades #5: Jointer or Planer Sled - A Test
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