2022 Product Showcase/Grizzly G0634X Jointer/Planer

First tool that we're looking at is the Grizzly Jointer/Planer 12 inch Cutterhead. You have already given me some enthusiastic comments about this. So, lay it on us. What do you like about this baby? Well, I have a small shop, and so, the ability to have a single footprint like this with big capacity, especially that size jointer, I have an 8 inch jointer, which is great, but having that much more, I do face jointing on everything, so having that kind of capacity and power would really be a nice addition. So what we've got going here, where Paul's making the small shop comment is this is a combo jointer/planer. So, 12 inch cutterhead here under the hood. It's unplugged so we can have a look at that. And then, you do a conversion, which we're gonna do for you in a little bit, and this machine becomes a planer. So, in one footprint, and that's where, like Paul said, in a small shop, having that ability to have two tools in this one space is crazy cool. Dust collection is good on it. It's a huge motor. It's a five horse motor. So, especially for face joint and stuff that wide, and for using it as a planer, that five horse motor's gonna be a great thing to have, a great power source. So, let's do this. Let's go to the video that we already shot, and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna show you how this machine converts from a jointer, where it is right now, into a planer. Lots of cool stuff going on with this Grizzly Jointer/Planer. The big thing is you've got two tools in a one tool footprint. So, it's just what it sounds like. It's a jointer, you just saw me joint an edge, and with a changeover, we can also use it as a planer. So let's talk about a couple great things. Unplug so we can do this. It's a 12 inch cutterhead. What's great about that is the ability that it provides to face joint really wide stock. In the perfect world, when you're squaring out lumber, you're starting with face jointing and then going from there to planing, so the larger the cutterhead in your jointer, the larger piece, of course, that you can face joint. Taking that a step further, it's a V-helical cutterhead, and it's got carbide inserts. So, a bunch of cool stuff going on there. Helix, the benefit to that is that, at some point, if you were learning to use a hand plane, somebody might have told you you can get a little better result from a hand plane by skewing the plane as you're planing an edge, rather than attacking the wood straight on. Similarly, maybe you've been using spiral router bits instead of straight flute router bits. The addition of a helical head to a planer and a joiner, same thing. It gives us a lot better surface finish on the material that we're working on. With carbide inserts, those open the doors to doing more stuff with our jointer and our planer. High speed steel, tool steel, jointer knives have some limitations. With carbide, of course, there's very little that we can't cut. With these, we're not gonna change jointer knives, we're simply gonna rotate cutterheads to a fresh spot, then because they're four sided, you can do that four times, three times besides the edge we're on right now, instead of going through and swapping out jointer knives. And because of the way they're indexed in here, when we rotate that, we're not going through that whole process of then aligning knives with the outfeed table on a jointer, so it really adds a lot of simplicity, and again, with the helical head, we gain a boatload in surface finish there. Now, big benefit, face jointing wide stuff like this piece of hard maple. First pass, gaining ground. You saw the way the machine handled this wide piece of hard maple. Part of that is 'cause this is a five horse motor, so you're gonna have to work pretty hard to slow that baby down. Sequentially here, what we'd wanna do is get one face flat. I just face jointed to this one. It's dead flat now. Then do our conversion to make this into a planer and come back and plane the other face. That's gonna have both faces parallel to each other and cleaned up of any saw marks. So, we'll do that conversion and then come back and look at the planer function. With the jointer/planer conversion done, and don't sweat it, we're gonna show you that in just a second, now we're ready to plane our material. And again, sequence of events, joint one face, plane the opposite face. So, still, 12 inch width capacity here and all the benefits of that carbide insert V-helical cutterhead, our capacity in this direction for thickness is 9 inches. That is significant for a planer, so I love that great depth of cut we can get in that direction. One of the things that's always so fun about changing a piece from roughs on to smooth, is, holy buckets, is that pretty. This piece has got some nice curl going here, it's got some curl going here, and again, benefit of the helical cutterhead and the great cut we're getting off of those carbide inserts is that is a really, really pretty board. So again, we've got a lot going on here. One is two tools, one footprint, additionally, a lot of good features in here. Five horse motor, 12 inch wide head, great thickness capacity on the planer, and, of course, for face jointing, the great capacity that we get there as well, so, a lot of tool here in a really small space. Here we go. Ready for this, sir? I'm ready. Don't blink, 'cause you could miss it. The other thing I wanna point out while we're doing this is if you have a question on the Grizzly machine, this is your opportunity to ask that question, and we will do our best to answer it. Can you take a-fence? What? That's a great one! All right. So, step one is the guard comes off, the fence comes off. Now, I'm gonna reach under, and there's a lock right here that's holding the infeed table in a down position. Same thing on the outfeed table. This handle right there. Look at Chris move into that shot for us. Now, a couple things. One thing that's crazy cool right now is we're looking at the cutterhead right here. Again, the machine is unplugged. Looking at the cutterhead. This looks a little scary, maybe, but when we're in this position, which is table's up, that guard not in place, the machine won't run, and that is a crazy cool safety feature. Until I flip this up, we don't have a planer. So, that's very, very smart on Grizzly's part to set that up this way. So, even with me talking, That was, what? A minute and a half maybe of changeover? Kind of like that, yep. And, of course, if I wasn't like, talking my way through it, it would be much faster, Well, let's talk about the planer a little bit. And a lot of this stuff was in the video that they just saw, but significant thickness capacity here on the planer. And again, with that five horse motor, plenty of power to make the cuts you wanna make, heavy duty cuts on the planer. Then, you and I are both big advocates of the spiral heads with the carbide inserts, and, with these, if you're not familiar with it, with the carbide inserts, you have four opportunities to, whatever, How are we gonna say this? Four opportunities to dull 'em, or, You know? Right. You've got four edges on each knife. So, one part of that that's cool is, if you hit a nail in the middle of the head, you could just change one cutter, not have to change the entire knife like you would on a conventional knife planer. And then, two, if you're looking for a fresh edge on every one of these, you loosen the bolt, turn it 90 degrees, loosen the bolt, turn it 90 degrees so that pain of resetting knives, you don't experience on this because the cutters are indexed right into the cutterhead. And not only are they so simple to change, but you almost never have to do it. They last like, 10 times longer than traditional high speed steel, so you're really gonna get a lot longevity out of those cutters. It's a great feature. And then with that shape of the head, again, as was mentioned in that video, that shearing-type cut that we get from these, it really optimizes the surface finish, and that's why I picked that chunk of maple that we worked with in the video, is 'cause you could really see there, just how well that comes out. Now, while the hood is open, it's locked open. So that's great 'cause you don't want that to come down when you're not ready for it to come down, but in reverse, it's very simple. So this would be up to provide dust collection. We do our planing. Now we want a jointer again, so we do this, this, and then lock that, and then this, lock that. Thank you, Vannagh. And you're back to being a jointer again.