How do I joint wide boards on a 6 jointer?

It's actually very simple. I read about it once in a WW magazine. Can't find the article but I'll just explain it to you and hopefully it makes sense.

First, take the guard off your jointer, and move the fence all the way back to the edge of the cutting blades. Set your infeed table down, to take a nice heavy cut, 1/16" should be good. Choose what face of your wide board you want to joint first, keeping warp and grain direction in mind. We'll call that "face 1". Run the board on the jointer for a single pass, "face 1" down. ObviOSly, if your doing a 9" wide board, you'll have 3" not getting cut at this time.

This will either leave you with a nice flat reference surface on 6" of the board, if so, skip the next paragraph. Or, if the board is warped badly, you'll need to take more off to get a flat reference section on "face 1".

To do that, you'll need to get a piece of 1/8" material (plywood, hardboard, something like that) and cut it the same size, but a bit longer, than your infeed table. Place it on your infeed table so its very close, but not touching, the blades. If you made it langer than your infeed table, it should be sticking off the end (right end) a few inches. Attach a piece of 3/4" stock to the underside of this board, right at the leading edge of the infeed table. What this piece does is prevent your 1/8" "sub base" from sliding into your blades when you pass your board over it. Now, lower your infeed table by another 1/8", to account for this sub base you just made. Now you can run "face 1" of your wide board over the jointer as many times as you need to, to get a flat reference.

So you should now have a 6" wide flat section on "face 1" of your 9" wide board.

OK, so now get yourself a chunk of 3/4" plywood, mdf or melamine, doesn't matter as long as it's flat, that is 6" wide, and just longer than the board your working on. We'll call this board the "planer jig". Take some 2 sided carpet tape, and attach this "planer jig" to the flat reference section of the board your working on. Now with "face 1" pointed down, run this whole thing through your planer. Make enough passes until "face 2" is perfectly flat. The board will stay stable going thru your planer, as long as your "planer jig" is 6" wide, and the board your working on is not more that 9" wide.

You should now have 1 9" wide flat face (face 2 ) and face 1 will still have 3" rough. Just run the board by itself now through your planer to get rid of that 3" piece, and thickness your board as desired.

There you have it. Would probably help with pictures, maybe one day I'll document it for the forum members. For now, if you have any questions feel free to ask.

By the way, once you have your jigs made, this acually goes very quickly on lumber that's not too crazy twisted to start with.

Ryan