Official Luthiers Forum!

Is anyone out there using one of these ? and if so what is your opinion of them, in terms of luthiery . I like to use spalted woods and other interesting woods that are hard to plane tnx in advance.

I would want to try one of those before buying.

I have a Byrd Shelix head in my planer & it works great but it has a lot more cutters than the Cutech.

Kevin Looker

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I'm not a luthier.
I'm just a guy who builds guitars in his basement.
It's better than playing golf.

I'm strongly with Kevin. I upgraded my old Delta 8" jointer to Byrd Shelix and the change was so incredible I gave away my surface planer and bought a new Powermatic that had the Shelix cutterhead.

Wood comes off these tools incredibly smooth and free of tool marks.

Figured wood about 95%, or more, free of the tearouts you'd see with conventional blade planers.

I used to change blades on my jointer at least twice a year, I'm going on the 5th year without rotating the carbide cutters yet.

Joint an ebony fingerboard smoothly with no chatter.

A few weeks back I had to plane a bunch of oak boards 8-12" wide. The surface planer was so quiet you could hear the dust collector over the planer. The old planer was so loud you'd have ear plugs under your ear muffs.

Best stationary tool upgrade to make along with carbide resaw blade on the bandsaw.

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Brian R, Wood Mechanic
N8ZED

I have a Cutech 6" bench jointer. It's a nice machine and does a great job on anything I use for guitars. It replaced a Grizzly unit and is a much nicer tool.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Steve , was it a grizz 6 in bench top, or regular jointer , cutech also has an 8 in jointer currently not available.

I bought a Grizz benchtop spiral head. The cutter was about 1+mm higher than the outfeed table with no way to adjust either to level. It went back.

Ernie, the Grizzly was a full sized regular 6" jointer. That's why I replaced it, it took up too much space in my small shop.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Time to save some shekels$$ and buy a real jointer with a byrd shelix spiral carbide cutters . Thanks everyone.

You'll only cry once...

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I'm not a luthier.
I'm just a guy who builds guitars in his basement.
It's better than playing golf.

I don't do any thing longer than a neck blank or side anymore so the little Cutech 6" bench jointer does an excellent job for me. For larger stock the in/out feed tables are too short and a full size jointer would work better.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Another option is to retrofit a machine, assuming you can find one and would want to do that but you could save some money.

The Shelix heads for the more common 6"-8" jointers are in the $325-$425 range. If you run into problems, Byrd will help, I spoke with Mr. Byrd while doing my planer.

https://www.holbren.com/byrd-shelix-jointer-heads/

Kevin Looker

_________________
I'm not a luthier.
I'm just a guy who builds guitars in his basement.
It's better than playing golf.

TNX fir the tips Kevin sadly I/ve cried more than once particularly since I started buying tools in the early 70/s and with not Much $$ could not afford good quality tools back then !