Re: Milling tongue and groove panelling plus using power feeder on jointer
¿ªÔÆÌåÓý?Hi Murray, I have made flooring on shaper using inexpensive industrial tongue and groove cutters from grizzly. these are 5 wing and 4¡± in diameter and worked great. IIRC. i processed about 1200 lineal feet. the drawback of this cutter set (not sure how others are) is that i cannot apply much of a finish to the T&G part and still assemble it. the joint is meant to be unfinished for assembly. you can get more control of T&G joint fit and depth by using rebate and grooving cutters. you can use one rebate cutter and make two passes or you can use two and get the tongue made in one pass. i have made bunch of shiplap by this method up to 12¡¯ long boards. granted it is not T&G but principal is same. by this time i had acquired the aigner pressure modules and they help keep the stock next to the shaper fence. i have also done complex cope and stick this way on door parts. the stiles got multiple passes with multiple grooving cutters. power feeder was used in all cases above. the only issue i am aware of, even on perfectly straight stock, is that sometimes the end of the board gets kicked out - moves away from cutter. this has happened with pressure module on infeed and outfeed of shaper fence. the only way to avoid this, i think, is to have outboard fence. i have not tried this yet. one important feature of T&G cutters is that they mill the complete profile. i set the outfeed fence proud to account for removed material. this is typically not done with rebate cutters, where only shoulders are milled on the tongue and groove on mating part. it goes without saying that for this type of processing preparation of stock is key. minor aberrations can be sanded away, if that is an option. there are a bunch of posts here on use of power feeder on jointers. i use it all the times on stock that is not twisted and is reasonably flat with excellent results. i have minor OCD tendencies. if it is important, each board gets put on the slider and i look for gaps along the entire length on both sides and ensure each corner is touching the table w/o gap before jointing is considered complete. somtimes i recheck both faces after thickness planning. sometimes i do this when it really does not matter just to marvel at the capability of the machine. i find it incredible that a 12¡¯ long board 12¡± wide can be made that flat. BTW, some wood will move and that is important to keep in mind otherwise you will end up with stock for toothpicks. on a relatively flat board i place board bow down and setup for 2-3mm cut on jointer. the power feeder is set about 5mm lower so only about 2-3mm below final thickness. the leading wheel is about 2¡± past the cutter. once the board is picked up by feeder it has been flattened and the feeder is no longer pushing the board down taking the flex out of it. i have processed 1x material this way bunch of times. i pick my material very carefully though. if you are not getting good results in general, i would suggest watching some utube videos in jointing. i had a hard time getting the hang of it and it did help me. hope this helps. imran On Nov 28, 2020, at 12:16 AM, murrayau1 <murraywp@...> wrote:
?Hi all I'm considering milling up some tongue and groove finger jointed panelling out of a pile of suitable stock material that I already have. This would involve using the jointer to straighten and square the timber? followed by thicknessing, then getting some sort of tongue and groove cutter either shaper cutter or router cutter. I have a CF 741 with both the router and shaper spindles.??I have to mill? about 300 feet of 4 inch wide planks.? I've never done a job like this before and in particular I haven't used a tongue and groove cutter head before and am a bit concerned that I might be underestimating the difficulty and amount of work. Has anybody done this sort of thing? Also I'm considering buying power feeder mainly for use on the jointer (planer). I don't do commercial work so productivity is not the issue, but of all the woodworking tools I use I find the jointer by far the scariest. So I'm hoping the power feeder might make this a bit easier and safer especially if I decide to mill all the T&G panelling. Is the power feeder suitable for use on the jointer? I find that using the jointer by hand is a bit of an art, you just can't feed it through anyhow unexpect a good result, so I'm uncertain that the power feeder will ?work properly with the jointer. Any advice on the above would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance Murray |
imran