Craftsman 17539 - 6.0 Amp Plate Jointer Operator's Manual page 11

_ WARNING: Do not allow familiarity with tools
to make you careless. Remember that a careless
fraction of a second is sufficient to inflict serious
injury.
,_k WARNING: Always wear safety goggles or safety
glasses with side shields when operating power
tools. Failure to do so could result in objects being
thrown into your eyes resulting in possible serious
injury.
APPLICATIONS
You may use this tool for the purposes listed below:
• Cutting precise mating oval slots in hard wood, soft wood,
plywood and particle board
SPLINE JOINERY
Spline joinery is one of the strongest methods of joinery
used in woodworking. When glue is properly applied to a
spline and to the joint area of the wood pieces being con-
nected, a large surface area receives the adhesion proper-
ties of the glue. This forms a strong joint.
Traditional spline joinery requires cutting slots with a
router or table saw. Small, thin strips of wood must then
be cut to fit inside the slots and act as splines.
Newer methods of spline joinery use a plate or biscuit
joiner to cut precise mating oval slots in adjoining boards.
This biscuit joiner is a fast, simple, and accurate plunge-
cutting tool that can be used to cut slots in hardwood,
softwood, plywood, particle board, and other pressed
woods.
Football shaped wafers, called biscuits, are then placed
inside the slots with glue and used to help line up ad-
joining surfaces. When a water based glue is used, the
biscuits swell in the joint, making an extremely strong and
firm bond. White glue, yellow glue, carpenters glue, hide
glue and aliphatic resin glue are examples of water-based
glues.This bonding technique has traditionally been lim-
ited to making edge-to-edge joints. However, with the use
of your new biscuit joiner, biscuits can now be easily used
to connect butt, miter, and T-joints. Biscuit joining can
be as strong as mortise and tenon, tongue and groove,
standard spline, and doweled joints. In most cases the
material around the biscuit will break before the biscuit
itself will break. A greater surface area is exposed to glue
in a biscuit joint, making the seams stronger.
A variety of spline joints can be made using the biscuit
joiner. The number and size biscuits needed for each joint
depends on the thickness of the wood and the length
of the joint. In general, the small #0 biscuits should be
used for miter cuts in 3/4 in. materials. The larger biscuits
should be used for edge-to-edge joinery.
11
When joining 1-1/2 in. thick materials, stack two biscuits,
one above the other. For example, use this method when
joining 2 in. x 4 in. dressed lumber. When joining even
thicker materials, use additional biscuits, stacked above
each other.
When making edge-to-edge joints for tabletops, work-
benches, cutting boards, etc. the more biscuits you use,
the stronger the joint will be.
TURNING ON/OFF THE BISCUIT JOINER
See Figure 4.
To turn on the biscuit joiner, depress the switch trigger.
Release the switch trigger to turn the biscuit joiner off.
When operating the biscuit joiner, hold the tool with both
hands. Keep one hand on the rear handle and place your
other hand on the fence to hold the tool steady against
the workpiece.
This tool has a dual grip rear handle that allows the opera-
tor to choose from two different hand positions and use
the one that is more comfortable.
UPPERHAND
PLACEMENT
PLACEMENT
Fig. 4