Most jointers are a pleasure to use until you hit that hidden staple or piece of grit and nick the knives. Then the honeymoon ends.
Adjusting or replacing conventional jointer knives is no picnic. If you’ve done this job before, you know that those tiny gib bolts are hard to tighten without shifting the knives out of whack. A magnetic knife-holding jig helps a bit, but it still doesn’t make the job particularly easy, much less foolproof.
When the time finally comes to upgrade your jointer, give Grizzly’s G0593 8″ Jointer a closer look. Unlike the typical jointer, it comes with a spiral cutterhead equipped with 40 replaceable carbide inserts. Each insert screws into a tiny pocket in the cutterhead and is automatically indexed to the correct cutting height. No more gib bolts to loosen or knives to adjust. When an insert gets nicked, simply unscrew it, flip it to one of three more fresh edges and retighten. It’s simplicity itself. Plus, the carbide should stay sharp longer than steel knives under normal use.
For other features, the G0593 has a generous 75″ overall bed length—one of the longer bed lengths in the 8″ category. The tables are controlled by large hand wheels for convenient depth-of-cut adjustments. A center-mounted, 38″ fence moves on a rack-and-pinion gear using a hand wheel, so there’s no need to slide the fence by hand.
A double V-belt drive and 2 HP, 220-volt induction motor should ensure that there’s plenty of power for making heavy passes on wide stock. Powering the machine up or down is also easy, thanks to a pedestal-mounted magnetic switch that places the On/Off controls above the fence.
A heavy-gauge steel cabinet and 4″ dust port fill out the “must have” list of features on this machine. Best of all, the G0593’s $995 price tag makes it attractively priced, even among similar machines without the indexed cutterhead.
For more info, call 800-523-4777 or visit the company’s web site at www.grizzly.com.
