WWGOA LIVE Product Showcase Spring 2022

We are in my shop again, Paul Mayer, and I in order to do another product showcase, Product Showcase Spring 2022. How are you Paul? Doin' really well George, thank you. You excited to look at some tools? As always. One of the things we were just chattin' about was how dorky we are in a good way, and still really enjoy lookin' at innovations. Absolutely, my favorite thing, woodworking and innovation coming together. So, we are going to look at tools. And as we do we're gonna talk through some features, benefits of each product as we get to it, and we wanna bring what we have learned about them to you. Ready to jump in? Let's do it. The first tool that we're lookin' at is the Grizzly Jointer/Planer, 12 inch cutter head. You have already given me some enthusiastic comments about this. So, lay it on us. What do you like about this baby? Well, I have a small shop and so the ability to have a single footprint like this with big capacity, especially that size jointer. I have an eight inch jointer, which is great, but having that much more, I do face jointing on everything. So having that kinda capacity and power would really be a nice addition. So what we've got goin' here it's where Paul's makin' the small shop comment is this is a combo jointer/planer. So a 12 inch cutter head here under the hood. It's unplugged so we can have a look at that. And then, you do a conversion, which we're gonna do for you in a little bit, and this machine becomes a planer. So in one footprint, and that's where, like Paul said, in a small shop havin' that ability to have two tools in this one space is crazy cool. Dust collection is good on it. It's a huge motor. It's a five horse motor. So, especially for face jointing stuff that wide and for using it as a planer, that five horse motor's gonna be a great thing to have, a great power source. So let's do this. Let's go to the video that we already shot and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna show you how this machine converts from a jointer where it is right now, into a planer. Lots of cool stuff goin' on with this Grizzly Jointer/Planer. The big thing is you've got two tools in a one tool footprint. So it's just what it sounds like. It's a jointer, you just saw me joint an edge. And with a changeover we can also use it as a planer. Let's talk about a couple great things. Unplug so we can do this. It's a 12 inch cutter head. What's great about that is the ability that provides to face joint really wide stock. In the perfect world when you're squarin' up lumber, you're starting with face jointing and then going from there to planing. So the larger the cutter head in your jointer the larger piece of course, that you can face joint. Takin' that a step further, it's a V-helical cutter head and it's got carbine inserts. So, a bunch of cool stuff goin' on there. Helics, the benefit to that is that at some point if you were learning to use a hand plane, somebody might've told you, you can get a little better result from a hand plane by skewing the plane as you're planing an edge rather that attackin' the wood straight on. Similarly, maybe you've been usin' spiral router bits instead of straight router bits, the addition of a helical head to a planer and a jointer, same thing. It gives us a lot better surface finish on the material that we're workin' on. With carbide inserts, those open the doors to doin' more stuff with our jointer and our planer. High speed steel, tool steel, jointer knives have some limitations. With carbide, of course, there's very little that we can't cut. With these, we're not gonna change jointer knives. We're simply gonna rotate cutter heads to a fresh spot and because they're four sided, you can do that four times, three times besides the edge they're on right now, instead of going through and swappin' out jointer knives. And, because of the way they're indexed in here, when we rotate that we're not going through that whole process of then aligning knives with the outfeed table on a jointer. So, it really adds a lotta simplicity, and again, with the helical head we gain a boat load in surface finish there. Now, big benefit, face jointing wide stuff like this piece of hard maple. The first pass, gainin' ground. You saw the way that machine handled this wide piece of hard maple. Part of that is 'cause this is a five horse motor. So, you're going to have to work pretty hard to slow that baby down. Sequentially here, what we wanna do is get one face flat, I just face jointed this one. It's dead flat now. Then, do our conversion to make this into a planer and come back and plane the other face. That's gonna have both faces parallel to each other and cleaned up of any saw marks. So, we'll do that conversion and then come back and look at the planer function. With the jointer/planer conversion done, and don't sweat it, we're gonna show you that in just a second, now we're ready to plane our material. And again, sequence of events, joint one face, plane the opposite face. So still, 12 inch width capacity here and all the benefits of that carbine insert V-helical cutter head, our capacity in this direction for thickness is nine inches. That is significant for a planer. So I love that great depth of cut we can get in that direction. One of the things that's always so fun about changin' a piece from rough sawn to smooth is holy buckets, is that pretty. This piece has got some nice curl goin' here. It's got some curl goin' here and again, benefit of the helical cutter head and the great cut we're gettin' off those carbine inserts is, that is a really, really pretty board. So again, we've got a lot goin' on here. One is two tools, one footprint. Additionally, a lotta good features in here. Five horse motor, 12 inch wide head, great thickness capacity on the planer, and of course, for face jointing the great capacity that we get there as well. So lotta tool here in a really small space. Here we go. Ready for this, sir? I'm ready. Don't blink 'cause you could miss it. The other thing I wanna point out while we're doin' this is if you have a question on the Grizzly machine, this is your opportunity to ask that question and we will do our best to answer it. You take the fence. That's a great one. All right so, step one is the guard comes off, the fence comes off. Now you're gonna reach under and there's a lock right here that's holding the infeed table in a down position. Same thing on the outfeed table, this handle right there. Look at Chris movin' to that shot for us. Now, a couple things. One thing that's crazy cool right now is we're lookin' at the cutter head right here. Again, the machine is unplugged. Lookin' at the cutter head, this looks a little scary maybe, but when we're in this position, which is tables up, that guard not in place, the machine won't run, and that is a crazy cool feature that, a crazy cool safety feature. Until I flip this up we don't have a planer. So that's very, very smart on Grizzly's part to set that up this way. So, even with me talkin' that was what, a minute and a half maybe of changeover. Kinda like that, yeah. And of course, if I wasn't like talking my way through it, it would be much faster. So, in reverse, well, let's talk about the planer a little bit, and a lotta this stuff was in the video that they just saw, but, significant thickness capacity here on the planer. And again, with that five horse motor plenty of power to make the cuts you wanna make, heavy duty cuts on the planer. Then, you and I are both big advocates of the spiral heads with the carbide inserts. And with these, if you're not familiar with them, with the carbide inserts, you have four opportunities to, how are we gonna say this? Four opportunities to dull 'em. Right. You've got four edges on each knife. So one part of that that's cool is if you hit a nail in the middle of a head you could just change one cutter, not have to change the entire knife like you would on a conventional knife planer. And then two, if you're lookin' for a fresh edge on every one of these, you loosen the bolt, turn it 90 degrees, loosen the bolt, turn it 90 degrees, so that pain of resetting knives you don't experience on this, because the cutters are indexed right into the cutter head. And not only are they so simple to change, but you almost never have to do it. They last like 10 times longer than traditional high speed steel. So, you're really gonna get a lotta longevity out of those cutters. It's a great feature. And then with that shape of the head, again, as was mentioned in that video, that shearing type cut that we get from these it really optimizes surface finish and that's why I picked that chunk of maple that we worked with in the video is 'cause you could really see there just how well that comes out. Now while the hood is open, it's locked open, so that's great 'cause you don't want that to come down when you're not ready for it to come down. But in reverse it's very simple. So, this would be up to provide dust collection. We do our planing, now we want a jointer again, so we do this, this, and lock that and then this, lock that. Thank you Vanna. And you're back to bein' a jointer again. Ernie is ready to take us to the next tool. Are you ready to go to the next tool? I'm ready if you and Ernie are. All right, let's do it. The Shaper Origin has been in the marketplace for a while now. I don't know what year they actually rolled out. I remember being at the show where it came out. And it's, you know, every once in a while you run into stuff at woodworking shows where it's a show stopper, and you wonder what's with the big line around that one spot at the show. And that year it was the Shaper Origin. I believe that. So, if you're not familiar with this tool, it's a handheld CNC. And the way this works is that this tape is put down on the surface that you're gonna machine. When we turn the Origin on, it's gonna read that tape and have the opportunity to find out where in space it is and then using that, it's gonna help you locate the tool path and do whatever work it is you're trying to do. One way to make that happen is the way we've got it set up here, which is I've put tape on this board. You're about to see that in a video. In this case, this is the work station, and this is crazy cool. The dominoes are here, they're built into the surface and then I would use the Origin over here. So, it's a little bit you know, think of a mortis jig, a dovetail jig, that's kinda, that's basically the system we've got here, except it's way more than just mortises and dovetails. So one of the things that intrigued us with this is that you find that, especially with CNC work, people are maybe a little bit stumped or intimidated by the fact that they've gotta do the design work, they've gotta figure it out. And you're, you've got a laser in your shop, but no CNCs, so Paul's got some level of comfort with this, but for people who don't wanna have to do a bunch of design from scratch, the thing we really wanted to highlight here was what's called the Shaper Hub. And Hub is a hub of information. It's incredible. So there's all sorts of stuff in the can. You're gonna see it on the video in a second. I think it was, do you remember? I think it was 1600 projects in the Hub. Huge number and growing, yeah. Something like that. So, you can access those online and then amazingly, this is on wifi, of course, my computer is connected to the world wide interwebs, and I can just send that file to the Origin and I can make the cuts. It's inherently in this hard drive. So, instead of me talkin' about it, 'cause I'll go on and on forever, let's have a look at that video and then we'll come back and we'll talk some more about this. What I really like about the Shaper Hub aspect of the Shaper Origin is it overcomes the question of how do I design my projects? What if I wanna make a table, how do I get started? There are so many projects, in fact, looking at my screen here, 1564, there are a bunch of projects that are already available to you online and all you have to do is find that project, get the file to the Origin, and we're ready to cut without you having to do any design work. This is a wonderful shortcut. So, let's have a look at what's goin' on here. One of the things I wanna point out is I'm already logged in to my Shaper Origin account. And as we go through here we can look at different types of projects that are available. We can sort. We can search. So, let's search for tables. What'll happen is, once we get into the zone that we want, we're in tables, when you click on that there's a picture of what the finished product is gonna look like. The files over here are the files that we need in order to cut that. So, someone has already figured all of this out. So this whole aspect of how do I get a design to then talk to my Origin? It's already been taken care of here. We're gonna see in just a second how to get these files to your machine. Another item in the dropdown menu here is hardware. So when I go there, look at this. Furniture connector, furniture connector. So, what this is all about is hardware that you might use in your projects that rather than hand cut mortises for this quadrant hinge, we can go to that file, grab the Origin file that goes with that hinge and use that to cut the recesses, the mortises, that are required for that quadrant hinge. And what a great service this is. There's all sorts of stuff included in this hardware page. Just some examples there, that are really gonna simplify you getting hardware installed in your projects by doin' that with your Origin. And again, it's all available here for you in the Shaper Hub. So for us today, simple sample project. Let's do a push stick. And projects. Have some to choose from there. Let's go with this one. Once we're in that project we can see the files that we need. Don't sweat those too much. I'm gonna show you how to get those to the Origin. There's some more pictures of what it is that we're about to do so you have a good idea of what direction the project's gonna go. Now when we know that we wanna do this, here's an amazing aspect. Remember I said earlier, I'm already logged into my account. I click on sync to Origin. Our work here is done. These files, because my laptop is on my wifi, my Origin is on my wifi, those push stick files are now there. What a simple way to transfer data. Now if you want to you can download the files, put 'em in a flash drive and bring flash drive to the Origin. But, if you don't have to, why would you do that? Let's get a little more setup done here and then we're gonna come and run that file on the Origin. Remember that, thanks to the beauty of wifi, the file from the laptop has now found its way by syncing, into the Origin. Here on the Origin I have already taken the time to scan the dominoes so the Origin knows where in space it is. I've set my parameters for cutting. We're gonna go a quarter inch deep, using a quarter inch diameter bit. I've already Z zeroed there. Now here's the gee whiz part, if you didn't have enough gee whiz already, import, there's my push stick file. Within that folder we could do one of the push sticks, the other push stick, the other push stick or you can do all three. So what it's done there is it's grabbed that pre-designed folder for me and all I have to do is locate it on my work piece. You can see the plywood through the background here. That's where I want it to go. And now either touch screen or using the trigger, I place that file, boom. And right there we're ready to cut. What you can see on the screen there inside the bullseye is the tool path. And again, we've talked about the ins and outs of these details that cut with Origin before, so we're not gonna hit on that again. But, I am gonna cut out these push sticks. And we're ready to go here with round one. Get rid of that. That is so cool that you can grab one of the nearly 1600 projects that are on the Hub, sync it with Origin and you don't have to sweat the design aspect 'cause that heavy lifting's already been done for you. It's such an easy way to import projects that are turnkey and ready to go. How do you see the Origin fitting into a woodworker's shop? It really opens up the possibilities, lets you think much bigger than you otherwise would. I think that they have really nailed it, not only on innovation, but on user experience and simplifying that experience of CNC in allowing you to take the CNC to the work and expanding the capacity of what you can do. I think, I love the projects that are on the Hub, but the hardware aspect is maybe the coolest thing, 'cause some of that stuff, you know, what's so cool is whatever you buy, like a Soss hinge or a Brusso hinge, whatever it is and there's a great likelihood you're already gonna find that in the can there, and that's just the kind of thing where letting in that intricate hardware for whatever, a mortis style lock or a lid stay or man, that's where that kinda finesse that's gonna come from those already bein' in place, is absolutely, it's huge. Yeah, I love that hinge application. I also love you see guys takin' these and doing inlay into wood flooring and with confidence. Think about what possibilities that kind of application opens up. It's a cool aspect that with a conventional CNC you're gonna bring the work to the tool because you have to bring the work to the tool. And in this case, we're gonna take the tool to the work. So you could be in the middle of a basketball gym and using this in order to do that kinda work. So, I do wanna do a little show and tell because this is the board that we cut on the video with the push sticks. And it is just, this is a very simple application of the kind of stuff that's available on the Hub, but it was a great example of the kind of things you can do and how easy it is to just sync that information in and pull it into the Origin so you can use it here. All right, Ernie, we're goin' to the next one. Kreg Foreman, pocket holes have become so, is it endemic or ubiquitous, I don't know, one of those words, popular, how 'bout that. There you go, I understood that one. Pocket holes have become so popular and nothin' wrong with usin' a pocket hole jib, but when you have 11 billion pocket holes to do, when you're doin' a lotta pocket holes, and a great example would be if you're doing face frames for a kitchen full of cabinets you are going to drill a lot of pocket holes. That's where the Foreman comes in. So, let's do, before we go to the video where we show a buncha stuff, we'll do a little once over here. So the way this works is that our material's gonna go under that hold down, little bit of pressure from this. Lock that in place. And then when I pull the handle the bit's gonna come up and drill that pocket hole for us. And the benefit to this is that place, drill, place, drill. So, in the video we cover a lot of different aspects of the Foreman, so let's go right to that video, have a look at that, and then we'll come back and talk some more about this product. Unless you've been livin' under a rock you probably already know that pocket holes are an incredibly fast and effective way to put material together. May not know about the Kreg Foreman. This is creating pocket holes on steroids. This is an incredibly fast way to create pocket holes. Here's the deal. When I pull this lever the drill bit comes up from the table. My material would be registered against that fence, and of course, the drill bit will be running, so it punches a hole in the back of our material. Here's how that looks. This is your material. Bring down the hold down. Lock that in place. Then. A lotta little things goin' on there. You may have heard a vacuum run when I ran the tool. I've connected to the tool actuated vacuum because there's really good dust collection internally on this unit. So, it's not throwin' any of the shavings from the hole that we're drillin' up around the environment here. On the fence there are a bunch of things goin' on. One, there are measurements on here that you can use to register the edge of your material and uniformly place it. The other thing that you can do is take advantage of the stops. They're spring loaded so when you're not usin' 'em you can just ride right over the top of 'em. When you do wanna use them, you can come against the fence, come against the stop, create your hole, come against the fence, I've bot another stop on this side, hit that stop, create the hole to control that spacing. So, one of the things that's nice about this is you're not havin' to mark your pieces in order to call out where the pocket holes go, because that really is done automatically for you by the fence. Fence positioning comes into play depending on the thickness of material that you're working with. So the way that we control how that hole ends up in our material is by movin' the fence back for thicker stock. That's the inch and a half thickness position. And then movin' it forward for thinner stock. So, let's go back here, inch and a half, because we've got the capacity to go from inch and a half to half inch on the machine. So there I've got a thicker chunk of maple. Same, get a little tension there. Lock that in place. Now the geometry of that, what's happening is it's controlling that hole position so that when the screw exits it's exiting on the center of the thickness of the material. That's where your greatest strength in a pocket hole joint is gonna come from is from havin' the screw centered on your material when it exits that. Now we can keep it in the configuration it's currently in, which is, there's a 3/8 drill bit in there or we can change the guide and go a step bigger to use heavier duty screws. We can change the guide and use a different drill bit to go a step smaller. So for your half inch material it would also be nice to go to a smaller scale drill bit. And again, for your thicker material, you maybe wanna step up to that larger scale drill bit and guide so that you can use a heavier duty screw, smaller screw. It's easy to see on this where your pocket hole is gonna end up because we've got this guide in the table that shows you really exactly what's gonna happen next. So in the case of this miter where I wanna do pocket holes, I don't want the miter, I don't want the pocket hole to come through this edge over here. So, first step, get my hold down set. And then, just by watchin' the position of that guide in the table relative to the edge of my material, that's gonna show me where that piece needs to go so that the hole doesn't exit that edge. Lots of cool stuff goin' on here, very, very, very efficient way to cut pocket holes in a variety of thicknesses of material and that's one of the cool benefits of this is it's not a one trick pony that's set up only for three quarter inch face frames. It gives you the capability to put pocket holes in many different thicknesses of stock and of course, as I said, we can change the drill, change the guide to also accommodate smaller or larger screws beyond the 3/8 bit that's in there right now. Great repeatability from usin' the stops and from usin' the marks on the fence. So this really ups the game in the efficiency, the speed with which you can cut, an already incredibly efficient joint. Cool stuff, pocket hole king. Let's do one here, just do one here. There, there. It's so fast. And of course, as you saw in the video, the fence can be adjusted. This can be adjusted. We can accommodate different thicknesses of material. It is a crazy quick way to put pocket holes into your work. Chris and Ernie, let's walk that way. Paul, how do you feel about setting your miter gauge to very precise angles? It's not one of my top 10 favorite things to do. In fact, I would say it's probably one of my top 10 things to avoid because I don't have the confidence in it. And I know when we were gettin' ready for this and we talked about the MiterSet, this was kind of an epiphany for you, what this provides and its ability to take that angst out of setting your miter gauge. What we're lookin' at here, it's such a brilliant idea, is a block, and in this one there are a number of steps that provide stats for the angel at which you want to set your miter gauge. So this slot is for the bar of your miter gauge, and then we can put pins wherever we want it in order to get the angle that we want. So, it's easy peasy stuff. Loosen the head of the miter gauge. Do this. Do this. Just push against those pins and there you are. Got two different blocks here. This one is for setting to angles. This one is for setting to number of sides. So this is the one that we use in the video that you're about to see. The example was, I wanna make something with 10 sides. You don't have to do any angular math in your head. All you have to do is put the pins zero and 10 and it's gonna automatically set you to the right angle. This one, if you wanna hit degrees in between the whole numbers, it shows you there. That's what that bar is for. That bar is gonna let you hit half degree increments. Let's have a look at usin' this to make a 10, what is a 10 sided thing? A tenagon. Tenagon. Somethin', it's a tengon. Let's look at makin' a tenagon. Part of the challenge with makin' a frame is getting the miters cut accurately so that when you bring the frame together everything closes like it's supposed to. MiterSet provides a really, really good solution to this problem in that this is a very accurately machined piece we can use to set your miter gauge. So, here's how this works. You find the angle you wanna set your miter gauge to. So, let's say we wanna use 30 degrees. One pin goes at zero. One pin goes at 30. And then with the head of your miter gauge loose, you slide up against those pins. Boom, boom. Lock that down. It's at a perfect 30 degrees. Now a good question would be, what if I want an in between kind of an angle? If I wanna hit 22 and a half, there's no mark on here for 22 and a half. That's what this bar is for. So that bar is gonna let us do something like this and this and this and hit angles that are the in between angles in half degree increments. So the concept is the same. Just follow the instructions in the Owners Manual, and that's gonna get you to incremental settings in between what you're seein' here. So that MiterSet standard is a very cool thing for setting your miter gauge in those applications. Now, let's go a step further. When you look at this, what do you see? Maybe see a 10 sided thingy. I'm a pretty avid bowl turner and I see this as the beginning of a segmented bowl with 10 components to that segment, walnut and cherry. So, there's another product. It's this guy. This is based on, the numbers here are based on how many segments do you wanna incorporate into your work. So in this case when we wanna do 10. Start in the same spot, zero, 10. You don't have to do any math to figure out what should the angle be for a 10 segment piece. You just use the numbers that are on the MiterSet, set your miter gauge and you're ready to go. So let me do, I'm gonna add a sacrificial fence to this, and then we'll come back, gonna reset my miter gauge to make sure I'm in just the right spot. We'll do some cuts so you can see how this all comes together. Gonna do 10 segments, again. And like I said, what's cool with this is no math, 'cause all the math is included right there. Now what I'm gonna do to get goin' is I'm gonna cut just an end on my cherry and walnut pieces so that I can then put that end against the stop block in order to make my subsequent cuts. At this stage of the game I'm just gonna do a bunch of cuttin' to get ready for actually makin' the segments we need. The other important thing to get the frame to come together correctly is to have uniform length on all our parts. I'm gonna use a stop block for that. And we've got a 10 segment ring comin' together so I need five cherries and five walnuts. Proof is in the puddin'. So what's cool about this is the more pieces we're cuttin', if there's cumulative error it's gonna show up because of the number of joints that were cut in this 10 segment piece. So you can see from the joint quality here how accurately we're set up. Now the way this would work for a segmented turning is glue this together, let that dry, send it through a drum sander to flatten it, wame thing here. But then I can start stackin' these in order to create my bowl blank and have that really cool contrasting wood look, plus the kinda brick mold pattern that's comin' around from doin' the segment like that. So the MiterSet does a really, really good job of takin' the guesswork outta gettin' your miter gauge set to just the right angle when you're doin' frames like these. So, one of the things I talked about in that video is the opportunity to use the MiterSet to cut a bunch of, to make a bunch of rings and make that into a bowl blank. You and I are both avid turners. So, after the video I continued that work and made a laptop stand apparently, which is actually that. Made a bunch more rings and then stacked 'em up. This is the beginning of a segmented bowl turning which starts with being able to accurately cut angles so that we can glue up the rings, so we can glue the rings together. So, to make this into a bowl blank this will get a bottom glued to it. And then this whole assembly can go on the lathe and think how cool that's gonna look as a bowl, contrasting colors, lots of neat stuff goin' on there, and you don't have to hollow the inside. You're not puttin' a bunch of shavings on the floor goin' to waste because the inside is already hollow. I love the way that the MiterSet takes the guesswork out of settin' your miter gauge to a specific angle and the accuracy of that tool is crazy cool. It's really, really, really dialed in. I wish I had one 25 years ago. One of the most common questions we get is how do you determine the angle and how do you set up your tools to make cuts like that? And now I've got an answer. Yep, yep. And so many people wanna make picture frames. It's such a common project. That entry point to being able to do that with a miter gauge on your table saw, great move. Jewels, jewels, jewels, did you enjoy that? I did, very, very fun to see that innovation and all the cool things you can do with these tools. Very exciting. And it's you know, and again, one of the things we talked about, was the ability to bring that to you. We're very lucky that we get to go to our woodworking shows, talk to manufacturers and do the stuff that we do, which a big part of our jobs. And part of the pleasure in that is bringin' that information out, and whether it's writing or a video or in this case, the product showcase, what a blast, to be able to look at it with your eyes and see what we learn. Absolutely. All right, well thanks again for comin'. Always great to have Paul's input, he's very, very good at this stuff and we'll look for the next showcase. My pleasure, thank you very much.