A Homemade 12-inch Jointer

It might seem crazy to think that a tradesman would build his/her own jointer. But if you have an old thickness planer laying around (or want to pick a used one up cheap), some birch plywood and 2x, and a fair amount of time you might consider it after watching this video. Even if building your own jointer doesn’t feel like a good use of your time, the 6 minutes it takes to watch this build will be. Canadian woodworker and engineer Matthias Wandel fuses his engineering Mensa-mind and woodworking skills to build the ultimate simple-yet-useful-and-cool workshop jointer. It may even be the most portable 12-in. jointer in the world.

Early on you’ll hear Wandel comment “so far so good, nothing exploded” – which doesn’t do much for building viewer confidence. By the end, however, you’ll see that he was just being ironic because it appears to work flawlessly. His design offers an incredible amount of precision and the mechanism for raising and lowering the infeed table is awesome.

A couple highlights:

At 1:00 he begins making a parallelogram mechanism as a way to raise and lower the infeed table.

2:10 glues up the infeed and outfeed tables, which are comprised of two layers of ¾-in. birch plywood.