Quote:
Originally Posted by opendoor
Depends on a lot of things, like what you usually building (i.e. length of boards), what kind of material you use (totally rough wood might have different needs than skip planed wood), and how much wood you'll be milling.
One option is to not have a jointer at all. If you mostly work with shorter lengths and/or partially milled wood, and are willing to use a planer sled or hand plane when needed, you could just go with a good planer. Often with careful wood selection and allocating the straightest boards to the longer lengths, it's possible to get away without one.
On the other hand, if you're dealing with longer, rougher boards but aren't going to be milling huge volumes of wood, a good jointer paired with a cheaper benchtop planer can be a good option (benchtop planers often produce a better finish than industrial ones). But cheap benchtop planers are pretty slow, since they can't remove as much wood as bigger ones, so if you're milling a lot of wood that gets old pretty quickly. And they're brutally loud.
To more directly answer your question, I think benchtop jointers are usually kind of pointless. The beds are too short to really straighten long boards and they're usually pretty cheesy. Jointers really do need to hold their settings (the weight of bigger ones can help with this) or they become frustrating to use. That said, I don't have a ton of direct experience with smaller jointers, so I could be wrong.
If I was starting from scratch I'd try to buy used if possible and if I was buying a jointer, I don't think I'd bother with benchtop. For a planer, helical cutters are great if you use a lot of figured wood (and they're quieter), but depending on the premium they cost, you might be better off with a traditional cutterhead and putting that money elsewhere. Here's how I did things:
-no jointer, just a super cheap benchtop planer and a table saw; it worked OK for furniture other smaller stuff as long as I worked around the limitations.
-added a 8" heavy duty jointer; this made using longer/bigger stock much easier and faster, but it soon exposed slow my planer was.
-added a 15" planer w/ standard cutterhead; this sped things up considerably and made milling wood a lot less annoying. But depending on how much wood you're processing, a higher quality benchtop planer might be totally sufficient.
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Great tips and write up, thank you.
When you say you upgraded from a bench top planer to a 15”, how heavy duty did you go? In other words, may I ask what model you got?
I love woodworking but I’ve never been able to set up a decent shop until now. I’m wondering to myself if many hobbyists end up with a $1500-$3000 planer anyway, should I just skip the $600 planer and get the big baddy right off the bat.