Best Woodworking Machines | Top Four Machines

is woodworking machines what do you need and what should you buy and i love talking about this because it’s my favorite hobby buying old machines and fixing them up i’m going to give you my top four machines i’m rob cosman and welcome to my shop we make it our job to help you take your woodworking to the next level if you’re new to our channel be sure to subscribe turn on that notification bell and don’t forget to turn on the notification on your mobile device so you’ll know every time we release a new video good all right back to the bench first one’s going to be the table saw so let’s spend a minute here pretty hard to recommend anything outside of a saw stop today they make they make the best best table saw i think it’s ever been built in this size it has the largest top great fence blade tilts away from the fence in case you’re not familiar most table saws prior meant that the blade tilted into the fence so if you were trying to cut a miter on a uh on a top of a chest of drawers for example when you’re cutting your your first one you’re having to cut and you’re trapping a piece of wood in there which is very unsafe and then when you go to cut the other one you’ve got the point of the miter that’s going to slide underneath the fence cutting tilting away from the fence is a huge advantage the more you use it the more you’ll come to realize that the safety feature is second to none lots of capacity 52 inches to the right of the blade so you can do everything you need with a full sheet of plywood so this is your number one tool you can use it to joint an edge i’m not going to get into showing you all that right now but you can actually join an edge with it you can even use it for a planer on stuff that’s not any wider than six inches you can make a cut flip it over on its edge and make another cut and it’ll get you very close so great tool uh if you’re gonna buy one make sure you have a rip blade and uh if not a cross got at least a combination blade there were times when it’ll do a better job that would be number one number two would be a jointer and if you’re gonna buy a jointer i’d stay away from the four inch i’d even stay away from the six inch you may as well get an eight inch and it’s going to be able to do most things you’re going to want a jointer for you buy a rough piece of rough lumber you need to face joint at first that means make one side flat that you can then process everything from referencing off of that one flat face eight inch jointer i’ll come back and talk to you a little more specific about machines but you want to make sure that the joiner you buy has an adjustable outfeed table the in-feed table always adjusts by that i mean as you lower this table you’re going to take a heavier cut but you want to be able to adjust your outfeed table as well to get it parallel with the top of your cutting circle it just offers you a lot more features than the kind the old kind that didn’t have or had a fixed outfeed table number three tool i’m actually going to put the drill press in front of the number four but you’re going to want to drill press so many of the operations when you’re woodworking requires something in terms of being drilled and i think that just this gets used a ton in our shop in fact i’ve got 18 of them but you need a drill press i would make sure you had a drill press that had an adjustable table i have several that don’t you just loosen them and then you got to catch them as they fall but having adjustable table is a big deal you always want to keep it tight as it tightens it writes itself which means in the relaxed position this actually drops down so it’s no longer square to this spindle but tighten it and it pulls that up so make sure you do that what else nice have a work light on it but other than that there’s not a whole lot of details you need it does have adjustable variable speed for that you have to change the pulleys which is a bit of a hassle and you don’t have to do it that often but if you’re dealing with any large diameter cutters you’re going to want to slow it down fourth tool is a band saw and this is some people would say this could actually replace the table saw i don’t think so but it certainly is extremely versatile this is a 15 inch i don’t think i’d get anything too much smaller than that the reason is the diameter of the wheel the smaller the diameter the shorter the uh the shorter it’s not the word i want the throat so this allows me almost 15 inches between the inside of the column and the blade so if you get a small diameter an eight inch wheel you’ve only got seven and a half inches in there but it also means that your blade has to flex a whole lot more bigger wheels you’re going to get a little more i wouldn’t call them heavy duty but medium duty i’m going to talk to you more specifically about brands as well but band saw would be number four and if you wanted to go on from there i’d probably put my thickness planer as number five but if you’re working with a budget obviously you have to do them one at a time now i want to talk to you about more specifically about brands this is uh my saw stop and as i said it’s pretty hard to recommend anything outside of a saw stop today because all the safety features so let me uh let me tell you a little more about this i prefer to buy old equipment i really can’t even think with the exception of sawstop i can’t think of a brand name today that i would go out and buy new and think i was getting a better machine than what you could buy from stuff made 40 50 years ago even older so this is a rockwell but this is probably somewhere in the 1970s still made in the u.s means the castings were done and they were seasoned properly so and they were ground nice and flat just a just a really good solid machine has a good solid fence completely adjustable now i rarely ever have my fence anything but 90 degrees but this is designed so you can tilt it 45 as much as 45 degrees in that direction like i said i rarely ever do that and you can move it forward and back to expose or cover more of the cutter head this has the segmented head and i did a video on that recently but this is probably next to the saw stop this would be the most significant invention improvement in woodworking power tools in the last 50 years and if you cast iron length the longer your jointer is the more accurate it’s going to be i think this one is six feet uh no not quite five foot seven inches height in case you’re interested this is 32 inches which is a nice working height for the average person um the adjust the depth adjustment is a spin wheel in here and i this one needs to be loosened up a little bit it’s kind of stiff we just bought this not that long ago and been process of restoring it you can lock the table i don’t bother locking the in feed table i’d lock the outfeed table now the significance of the outfeed table you want to be able to line that up perfectly with the top of the cutting circle and by doing that you loosen the knob and then it has a spin a hand wheel here as well and you would just simply move that until when you’re checking as the board is coming across the in-feed table and goes over the cutter what’s been removed by the cutter needs to be accounted for with the outfeed table which means you don’t want to see a gap between the newly cut surface and the outfeed table nor do you want that board to ride up on this when it meets it it needs to be at on the same level as the top of the cutting circle and that takes a little bit of work to do but it’s not it’s not something that you can’t easily pick up and learn how heavy machine weighs about 500 pounds big advantage when it comes to stability if you look down in here i’ve changed most all of the belts in our shop and we now use actually i’ll show you a piece right here we use uh what do they call jake link belts so link belts are quieter they have a better grip and there’s less friction involved but they’re expensive how much for one of those how much 50 for four feet so there’s almost a hundred dollars in each one of these so each one of these was a hundred dollars and we’ve got one more to go so it’s expensive but the performance i think the performance warrants the price power you can run an eight inch jointer on a one horsepower i don’t think i’d go less than that i think we’ve got an inch and three quarter horse on this which we never stall it that’s what i can tell you about a jointer critical machine in the shop let’s go over here to the drill press uh actually let’s let’s step right back here and i’ll give you an example of a good machine but something that’s lacking so this is a general general was made it made in drummondville quebec it was the last as far as i know it was the last north american manufacturer of woodworking equipment where they actually were building stuff right here in our soil great machines this company essentially got its start by providing public schools with woodworking equipment for their programs so their criteria was it had to be simple to operate it had to be indestructible and easy to maintain and the nice thing about these belts bearings and motors are the only things that we’re ever going to go and all three are easy to replace if you broke a casting that’s a different story but for the most part those three things were the only maintenance issue hey if you like this video we have more our newsletter has subscriber only content monthly discount on tools and anything we bring out that’s new subscribers get first crack at it click on the link below let’s get back to work uh nice thing about this it has a quill lock so this is the quill and you can lock it by squeezing this piece and hold it in position you can also there’s another one right here that you can adjust and that’s to get re get rid of as much slop as you as you possibly can and that’s what i dislike about some of the newer machines with the quill fully extended you can sit there and you can wiggle that thing quite a bit and it’s annoying because that run out we call it makes for inaccuracy when you’re drilling the downside to this got a small work table the table is adjustable you can turn it you know i think you can go oh i think you can go 45 degrees in both directions at least but there’s no adjustment for the table you can’t wind the table up or down so you simply loosen that lever holding this manually get it the height you want a lot of lowering is easy raising it’s a bit of an issue and then snug it up there’s your chuck key for for changing bits but it’s a good machine if it wasn’t for that adjustment on the uh on the height of the table it would be fantastic it’s got a nice big heavy cast iron base now that’s a lot bigger than most and it’s a lot heavier which just means it’s going to be a lot more stable ideally it should be bolted to the floor but it’s heavy enough that it’ll stay there now if we contrast that one there is a work light available on that but it’s an accessory that you had to buy so this is one made by jet which is readily available as i mentioned earlier same i think you got a few more options when it comes to speeds but you know if you look at this available speeds anywhere from 200 rpm to 3 630 well 200 500 800 well actually it goes from 200 3 200 290 350 430 i can’t imagine ever needing 350 as opposed to 430 or 290 so a bit ridiculous when it comes to that it does have a work light tucked up in there which is nice it floods the area with light which i love the downside is it doesn’t have a quill lock and if you i don’t know if you noticed but when i shook the quill over there there was no movement watch this you see how much movement there is that’s really irritating drives me nuts and it comes like that in a new machine this isn’t that’s not because of wear it does have the the lever to raise and lower the table which is a really nice feature it’s a round table and i don’t have any issues with it it is larger space it is nice to be able to clamp things in place and you can adjust that as well actually this one will actually spin and you can also tilt it one side of the other base is not as big it’s not as heavy a machine but if you’re buying new today you don’t have you don’t have options like you did on the old stuff sorry let’s go over the band saw save the best for last so here’s what i have for examples this is a rockwell delta which is a 20-inch machine probably somewhere in the 1970s this is a poitra and i may be butchering the name but this was a company out of quebec canada as well that company was purchased by general i don’t know how many years ago and they absorbed some of their designs and others that just faded away and then this is the general 15-inch which was a very popular bandsaw but also a very expensive band so i think these were somewhere around 6 000 when they were available which is a ton of money when you could you can buy an offshore model today for probably fourteen or fifteen hundred dollars but there’s some features about that that are just second to none so look now this is probably more applicable for the audience that are watching this this is a lot of cast iron the base actually that’s i just lied this is a manure version but it’s it’s stamped steel but it’s heavier than most the cast iron is going to be in the frame so if you open the doors yeah i might even clean this out now this section this back section is all cast iron so it’s nice and rigid a lot of tension on that from the belt and from the bottom from the uh the blade this is a cast iron wheel top and bottom and the wheels have what are called a rubber tire on there so that’s a rubber tire so that your blade isn’t running on steel and it’s slightly crowned so that when this runs and it tracks the blade will stay on the top dead center of the wheel that’s important you don’t want that wandering popping off on you this one does not have a break the dust collecting on here could be better than it is i actually if you go and watch one of my videos i made a an attachment that makes a much better dust collecting system but this was a simple machine but it was a well-built machine now this has bearings on both sides faced differently than the poitra so you’re going to squeeze your blade between these two bearings if you actually touch it it gets kind of noisy you want it to just clear it maybe a little bit less than the thickness of a piece of paper in between each one but again that’s there so that when you’re making a turn a curve and your blade has a tendency to want to twist this will prevent that from occurring and then you’ve got the bearing and the thrust bearing on the backside same bearings are found underneath as well and you try to have them as close to the top as possible so that the area that’s uh being exposed the closer these are to the work piece the better and the more stiffer it’s going to keep that blade so you always want to have cutting a piece of stock like that you’re going to want to bring this down so that it just clears it then lock it in place and there’s some nice adjustments on here too you just loosen that thumb screw and you can dial that in to get as close as you need there’s your tension up here and there’s your your tracking back here which always has a lock screw on it as well so when you get it in position and some people a little nervous in doing this so what i do is i just spin it by hand and then you can go in here and you can track it and when you get it where you want it lock it turn the machine on just eyeball it to make sure it’s running properly and away you go good machine good machine and a good size for a small home shop 15-inch anyway so that’s it any questions you’re always welcome to forward your comments to us go to our website robcosman.com there’s a place in there you can ask questions we’ll do our best to answer them and if it’s a really good question we’ll make a youtube video youtube video out of it hope you enjoyed this if you enjoy my method of work and like my style of teaching click on any one of these videos to help take your woodworking to the next level i’ve always said better tools make the job so much easier if you click on the plain and chisel icon below it’ll take you to our site and introduce you to all the tools that we actually manufacture right here in our shop it’ll also give you information on our in-person and online workshops …

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