Very disappointing, even bearing in mind its low price point
Written: Oct 07 '06
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Light, portable, cheap
Cons: Aluminum tables, flimsy fence, difficult or impossible to adjust for accurate work
The Bottom Line: Even considering its small size and small price, it still isn't any kind of good value
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| woodwr3ck3r's Full Review: Delta Shopmaster Bench Top Jointer JT160 |
I bought this on a whim. I have a small shop, and this is a small, portable tool. I have plenty of experience with buying things twice, but apparently that lesson wasn't stuck in my head on the day I decided to throw this thing on a cart and take it home.
I saw it had aluminum tables. I have had bad experiences with aluminum tables before, but I somehow talked myself out of my concern this time. (I notice one of the other reviews here speaks of cast iron tables. I just double checked that I have a JT160, instead of some other model. I do, and I can assure you it does not have cast iron tables.)
I saw it had a flimsy, awkward fence, but I convinced myself I could figure out some way to rig up something better, out of angle iron or something. (I never did rig up anything better.)
This whole thing was an exercise in being a stupid buyer, because I had real, informed reservations, and yet I whipped out my wallet anyway, figuring it was better than nothing, and cheap. Besides, it was a real Delta. At that point in time, I was throwing up my hands in frustration over my poor skill with hand planes (the ultimate small shop solution for your wood truing needs, if you can pull it off) and was looking for a mechanized solution to help bridge the skill gap.
I did not have high expectations, but in spite of cutting this thing as much slack as I can for being a cheap, baby benchtop tool, I'm still terribly disappointed in this machine.
The aluminum tables are the worst thing about it. They've got a fine pattern of surface scratches, something like the sole of a corrugated hand plane, but on a small scale. Maybe the idea is to break the suction and make it easier to slide wood, but the effect in practice is that they're like driving a board over the rumble strip that warns you that you're about to run off the side of a highway. Run your fingernail over a cast iron table, and it makes no noise. Run the same fingernail over these tables, and it makes a sound like sliding a pick along a wound guitar string. In addition to the extra friction, they also leave black aluminum oxide streaks on every board as soon as the wax wears off, in about three passes.
To make matters even worse, you can wax and wax and wax the things, and never get them any slicker. The wax doesn't build high enough to top the little ridges, and the wax wears off the tops of the crests almost instantly. I even tried using my Mother's Power Ball on the thing (for polishing aluminum car rims to a mirror shine), but there was too much material to remove to achieve a smooth surface. It needs grinding, not polishing.
The next worst thing is the fence. It is some kind of stamped sheet metal affair with a very awkward tilt and slide mechanism. Tilt and slide are controlled with... I have no idea what they're called. They're bolts with a plastic handle on top, making an inverted L shape. You press down the plastic in order to get it to rotate to a new position, then a spring re-engages it with the bolt head so you can turn the bolt without a wrench. In practice, the two plastic handles are always getting in each other's way, and it's a juggling act moving this out of the way to move that whenever it is necessary to reposition anything.
Sliding the fence in and out is tricky and tedious, but changing the angle of the fence is an exercise that falls just short of outright futility. I suggest if you buy this thing, set the fence at 90, and never, ever touch it again. To change the angle, you have to loosen one of the L bolt thingies, which allows a lot of slop between two pieces of painted, stamped aluminum (no machining here, folks). You move the fence to the desired angle, tighten it up, which is hard to do in one smooth motion, and then watch the angle you just set move once the bolt is tight. Getting the angle set correctly is a matter of setting an angle a degree or two away from where you want it to end up when it's tight, and then checking to see where it wound up once the pressure is back on. It's not impossible to get it at 90, but it's incredibly tedious.
The poor design of the adjustment mechanism was obvious enough in the store, so I decided to live with that when I bought it. What I didn't anticipate was how flimsy it would be in actual use. My fence was not warped severely enough to cause major problems, I don't think. The bottom 2/3 of it were 90 degrees to the table, with some deviation at the top, but it seemed close enough in the right places to get an edge square, if the edge started off close to square. The problem is not warpage, but with how easily the thing deflects when you put any pressure on it. It pivots on the locking mechanism and swings side to side while you work stock through it. I'm not positive it actually matters so long as the angle to the table remains at 90 degrees, but it sure makes the machine feel delicate, and untrustworthy.
All of the above complaints were more or less obvious to me at the time of purchase, and I bought it anyway. Ultimately, I figured it would make boards flat in spite of these annoying design compromises. If a board starts off close to flat and close to square, this machine can get it more flat, and more square. If I try to flatten a cupped board, or true up an edge that's substantially off of 90 degrees, all I've ever managed to do with the machine is make wedge shaped firewood. Something is fundamentally wrong with its adjustment, and no amount of tinkering has yielded a solution to the problem.
Finally, I've just come from replacing this machine with what I should have bought to start off with. I had to put every machine in my shop on mobile bases in order to make room for a real jointer, but it was so worth the effort. Even though I rarely, if ever, work on a board longer than 4', and most under 2', there is just no comparison between the user experience of feeding a board through this Delta vs. the new full-sized RIDGID. I should have spent the other $200 to start off with, and saved myself a lot of frustration, and wasted lumber. Now I have $800 tied up to achieve what I could have done for $600 the first time ($400 for the bigger jointer, and $200 for the materials to put everything in the shop on wheels to accommodate the behemoth thing.)
I've had this machine for two or three years, and barely gotten the knives dull. I've spent hours trying to figure out what was wrong with my technique, my setup. I still don't know for sure. Maybe this is a perfectly serviceable little machine, and I'm just an idiot for not being able to figure out how to adjust it properly. I have wrestled with this little screaming beast off and on for years, and I always figured I was too stupid to make a board flat. Now that I have a real jointer (The RIDGID JP0610) I see how all of this is supposed to have been working all along. Maybe there is a setup issue I could fix here, but one thing I can say for certain is that it was not set up out of the box to do anything useful, and fixing its problems was anything but obvious to me.
I vow to make this the last machine I had to buy twice.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
woodwr3ck3r
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Location: Virginia, USA
Reviews written: 7
Trusted by: 1 member
About Me:
A multi-faceted Renaissance man
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