New Woodworking Tool for the Bee Store

    I made a trip with my friend and bee store employee Quentin over to Bainbridge Island last Thursday and purchased a jointer for the bee store. The ferry ride was lovely and a new experience for a cowboy from Wyoming.  Quentin had found the jointer on Craigslist and the price was sufficiently low to easily justify the milage and two ferry rides to fetch it home. I guess one up side to our current soft economy is that the prices have gone down for a lot of things on Craigslist. The guy who sold the jointer is a professional woodworker who logs and mills some pretty special wood. He had just purchased a bigger and better jointer so this one had become surplus.  His woodshop included a big C and C machine, a monster planer, his new jointer with a twelve inch wide bed, and an incredible collection of wood. Even Quentin the seriously obsessive woodworker was impressed.

     A jointer can be a dangerous tool as evidenced by Mike Veatch's loss of part of one digit to a jointer some years back.  One benefit of Mike's injury is that I never turn the machine on without remembering that. It has helped me be very careful with the jointer. Linda had asked me why we needed a jointer and I found it difficult to give her a concise explanation. The difficulty wasn't in justifying the jointer but in explaining its purpose to a non woodworker.  In a nutshell a jointer is used to put a flat surface of a piece of wood.  I have some bigleaf maple that has been curing in my shop for several years.  The jointer does a pretty slick job of flattening one side so I can run it through the table saw and make something useful from it. It can also flatten the edges of boards so they can be glued together to make larger pieces like for a table top or a cedar chest. It can also produce rabbeted edges.  Anyhow, I think its a pretty good addition to our shop.

     These two pictures demonstrate what a jointer can do.  The top piece of wood has been jointed flat on two sides. The lower picture shows the jointed piece compared to a rough unjointed piece.