Minimum safe jointing length?

[Cecil]

Hand plane, as others said, or router, or even a good belt sander.  For one-offs, grabbing the hand tool is likely faster.

[JGrout]

You have a DANGEROUS jointer with a gap that large.  No smaller than a foot and a half or so, and a good set of wooden hands to move the wood.   Watch the transfer of feed pressure from after hold to forward table after the board is established there so you don't dip and kick.  Whatever you do, let the whole thing fly if it kicks, don't try to save it.

1 3/8" wide is dangerous

  


I use a DJ20 that is wider than that and have been around a square head unit twice that wide 

That one  I considered  dangerous

[MichaelMouse]

At 98 year vintage, I'm imagining - hopefully just imagining - an old square head finger eater.  If it's not, can go a foot with a full-length block because the knife exposure above the head is small.  Guy up north of me has two of them.  one is a 16", and the sound of the head is enough to dampen your pants.

[®smpr_fi_mac®]

You have a DANGEROUS jointer with a gap that large.  No smaller than a foot and a half or so, and a good set of wooden hands to move the wood.   Watch the transfer of feed pressure from after hold to forward table after the board is established there so you don't dip and kick.  Whatever you do, let the whole thing fly if it kicks, don't try to save it.

What?  Dangerous?  How?

At 98 year vintage, I'm imagining - hopefully just imagining - an old square head finger eater.  If it's not, can go a foot with a full-length block because the knife exposure above the head is small.  Guy up north of me has two of them.  one is a 16", and the sound of the head is enough to dampen your pants.

It's a 2-blade, round cutter.

[TGW]

With a gibbed round head and a retrofitted cutter guard your jointer can be just as safe as any modern jointer.
I have had to do some reserarch on this subject when bringing my old machines up to modern European workplace safety standards which are quite a bit stricter than OSHA especially in Finland where the regulations are read and applied in a much stricter manner than in the rest of EU.

Jointers built for professional use generally have largers diametre heads than small hobby machines. Older round heads are sometimes even thicker than modern round heads as a thicker head produces a smoother finish with the low RPM they used back then.
My 24" Stenberg (manufactured in 1957) has a head which is around 100mm in diametre. That makes the cutting cirkle close to 105 mm in diametre. (just over 4 inches) The gap between the tables is around 60 mm (almost 2 1/2 inch).
Some old jointers have round heads up to 150 mm (6 inches) in diametre with corresponding large gaps between tables.

They are all perfectly safe as long as the head is a proper gibbed head and not a square head nor a clamshell. Clamshells are the oldest type of round heads where the knives are held with their face against the cutterhead body by some sort of pressure plate held by bolts in tension. Those bolts tend to snap or strip out their threads due to metal fatigue when clamshell heads become old. Hence clamshell heads are illegal for use by employees in all of Europe and in USA and in Canada. Gibbed heads use bolts in compression and hence there isn't much of a fatigue problem.

If the cutterhead in an otherwise wellbuilt jointer is of an unsafe type a replacement head will generally be 1/10 to 1/2 of the cost for a new jointer of similar size and build quality. This means that a conversion is often worth the cost. Theese days when people are crazy for Spiral and Tersa heads one can sometimes buy overlenght secondhand gibbed heads cheap and turn down the ends to fit as replacements for old square heads or clamshell heads.

There should be a cutterhead guard covering the cutterhead both in front of and behind the fence. A fully approved rear guard is easily made from a piece of thick plywood slightly hollowed out on the underside and hinged from the fence. The front guard could be a simple welded up contraption holding a plywood guard.

People trend to assume that everything which isn't new and supported by the manufacturer is unsafe. Just because that is what some marketing executive told them. Those marketing executives try to make people scrap good machines for non-existant safety reasons so they can be convinced to start buying new machines of inferrior quality with short calculated lifespans.
My oldest machine is a cirkular rip saw manufactured in 1885 and a 24"bandsaw manufactured in the 1910-s. Both of them recently got new custom made guards and are just as safe as any new machine. In fact safer than some chineese machines where the guards are too weak to do their job. Both are ready for their second century of professional use.

I am a professionally trained joiner and (been through 3 year vocational school) and we were taught that on professional jointers with theese large gaps and large heads the minimum lenght of the wood to be planed is 25 or preferably 30 cm. That is 10-12 inches.

[®smpr_fi_mac®]

Mine has a guard that works with gravity--the red weight on the string pulls it into place after I move it.  I'll look into the back side guard.

[TGW]

That definitely looks like a good jointer!

[®smpr_fi_mac®]

TGW--

I found it on CL in January; paid $250 for it.  PO said the motor didn't run.  I think he had wired the switch up and tried it without wiring the motor in.  That was an easy fix.  Then found that it stalled under any load:  it's internally wired for 240, but had a 120 plug.  I fixed that and it cuts like the day it was new.

[Big fish]

How to remove twist between infeed and outfeed tables on my Jet jointer?

[JGrout]

How to remove twist between infeed and outfeed tables on my Jet jointer?

Start by going through this troubleshooting list 

shown in this link