6" Jointer

I have a Ridgid. It works. I wish it was 12 inches wide and 96 long. On long boards I use a # 7 Jointer plane.

-- Thos. Angle, Owyhee Design, Oregon

I don’t have their jointer, but my experience with Ridgid is all positive.

-- Maplewood, MN

Thanks for the feedback. I think we all wish we had a 12” jointer, but the 6” is all I can afford and the ridgid looks to me like the best buy.

-- Jeremy, Saratoga, NY

i have it but havent always loved it . at first set up it seemed to make fairly poor rocking chair rockers from everything i jointed i adjusted the tables and got better rockers so it sat in the corner for a few monthes , then it came to me like a bolt of lightning ! get out the book that came with it ! 10 minutes later works perfect ! lol guess you just have to be a little smarter than what your working with . it is a great tool !

One piece of advice I would like to add is that if you get a 6” jointer it won’t be long before you wish you had a larger tool. You might want to consider saving up for an 8” machine. The difference in cost is not that much and
in the long run you will be much happier with the performance. I have a 6” powermatic that is three years old and wish I had gone ahead and got the 8” version.

Just a thought.

-- With God's help all things are possible- even woodworking. Woodworking is not just a hobby, it is an (expletive deleted) expensive hobby.

Jeremy,

I have gave some thought to getting a jointer recently. The advice I got because of limited space and $’s was to consider a planer. I have pretty much decided to go with the planer.

I just ran across on e-bay a grizzly G0604XB (the B = Blemished). Its a 6” parallelogram jointer. It has 22 bids and is at $330 or so with “buy it now” at $450.

I have seen a lot of advice about going directly to 8”. So the 6” may not be what you want.

Thought you might want to consider it.

Dalec

I’ve been looking at jointers on and off for a while. The Ridgid jointer gets pretty consistent high marks but one thing pointed out in the newwoodworker.com review (which was, btw, a very positive review) was the minimum thickness requirement:

Minimum Material Thickness

The only design feature I am less enthused about is the ¾” minimum material thickness as stated in the instruction manual. The safety guard is cut with this minimum thickness in mind, allowing material under ¾”-thick to pass beneath it rather than make contact to push it aside as it is moved across the cutter. A ¾”-thick board can be planed once, maybe twice with very light cuts but will then be undersize according to the Ridgid JP06101 instructions.

This minimum thickness is only a problem when planning boards and has no impact on the more frequent jointing operations.

Whether this design specification would be an issue in your shop depends solely on the material you use. I suspect for many woodworkers, this will not be an insurmountable problem.

I could never really decide if this would be a problem for me or not but it is probably worth noting.

-- Tom, Southwest Florida