I've had my '97 BF6-31 for almost two weeks now, and have been spending my
evenings cleaning up the machine and checking alignment. One thing I have
noticed is that the fence when mounted on the in-feed jointer table can not
allow use of the full width of the jointer... to hang on to the dovetail
rail it uses up a few inches of available jointing width. One solution I
heard was to not use the jointer fence at all when face-planing wide boards.
I haven't really thought about whether that would have safety risks or not.
I know there is a cast-iron "dovetail-on-dovetail" adapter piece which can
be used to extend the dovetail rails a number of inches for ripping or
jointing, but I was more impressed with the bolt-on "filler piece" available
for the 7-series combos. Unfortunately, this bolt-on piece is not available
for the 6-series, but by gosh it should be! It looks like there are even
bolt holes ready for mounting just such a thing.
Has anyone found a solution to this? Maybe having a machine shop mill a
table extension just for this? If there was enough interest, maybe we could
get several in the group together for a larger discounted order from a shop,
or perhaps we could convince Felder to come out with this accessory for our
machines. I'm assuming such an extension would not interfere with anything
when tilting the tables up for planing... but maybe I've overlooked
something.
Thoughts, anyone?
--
..Geoff
