Loose biscuits on 10ER

[sasjzl]

Hi,
I have a beautiful 10ER that I restored a while ago and have just recently found time to use. Everything is working great with the exception of the biscuit joiner attachment. I know that this was made for the Mark V but since the arbor size is the same I am able to use many Mark V accessories without a problem. What happens is the cut it makes for the biscuit is too wide. I have never used biscuits before but thought that I had read they should provide a snug fit before they glue and expand with water. My portable biscuit joiner, using the same blade, creates a cut that receives the biscuit as a firm fit as I would expect. It is not tight but just enough to do a dry fit. My first thought was that my table top was not exactly parallel to the blade but I have done a lot of testing and it all looks square to me. One of the tests I did was to put the huge sanding disc on that looks like about 12 or 14 inches in diameter. Lowered that down and put a light behind to check that the gap was even and it all came down at the same time. It looked good. By the way, any suggestions on checking the squareness of a 10ER would be most appreciated.

I am thinking of grinding down the joiner blade so that it will make a narrower cut but I am not so confident about that working out, though even if I was off parallel enough to make the cut too wide I would think that making the blade thinner would work. Has anyone else had this problem using the biscuit joiner attachment. I hate to give up on it because I think it would be great to be able to bring the work to the blade instead of using the portable joiner.
I am wondering if this problem might have something to do with the accessory not being designed for the 10ER but I don't see why it would work differently since all we are doing is spinning a blade and cutting wood just like the table saw, which by the way cuts as square as I can measure.

Is anyone out there actually using a 10ER to make biscuit joints?

Thanks very much,
Jim Lee

[SDSSmith]

First, I have never tried to mount my SS biscuit joiner on my 10ER. As I recall there is fellow by the name of Zeev Perry ?? over on the 10ERUSERS group over on Yahoo that has. He made some sort of an adapter to use the biscuit joiner on the 10ER. You might go over there and search the messages.