Shopsmith Forums

What about drilling the screw out entirely?
All you would have to replace is the wedge.

If you're not careful when drilling the screw out completely you may have to replace the cutter head.

True, but if everthing else fails.

To clarify a little, there may not be a lot of the head left if the easy out didn't get it.
Drill the head off of the bolt, the wedge should come off.
The stub sticking up gives you something to work on.

At the end of the day, replacing the head may be what's left.

The Wood Shop teacher was thrilled to have new spiral cut jointers and planers installed this spring. The inserts slide in and out and rotate with very little trouble. The old stuff he had before, standard type blades, the district would not let him remove and sharpen. Had to send a guy out from M & O to do it. Took a work order and 6 months for it to come up on rotation.

charlese wrote:Hi Doc! I've been kinda fascinated by the spiral cutters in jointers and planers since first viewing the adds for them. There are a couple of things about them that have me baffled.

1) How does one sharpen those little blades
2) How much finagling is needed to adjust them when replacing.

jimthej wrote:The Wood Shop teacher was thrilled to have new spiral cut jointers and planers installed this spring. The inserts slide in and out and rotate with very little trouble. The old stuff he had before, standard type blades, the district would not let him remove and sharpen. Had to send a guy out from M & O to do it. Took a work order and 6 months for it to come up on rotation.

Thanks for your reply, Jim!

Here's an idea that is a little cheaper than replacing the cutterhead, but you will have to replace the wedge. You can also use it as an excuse to buy a couple more toys.

First of all, pay attention to all the advice about penetrating oil and heating up the cutterhead. These help to break the friction/rust lock that is preventing you from backing out of the screw. Also, clamp or wedge the cutterhead so it can't turn, put a punch in the center of the screw and whack it very, very hard. This momentarily compresses the screw and helps to break the lock.

Dremel makes a thin, abrasive-impregnated fiberglass cut-off blade about 1-1/2" to 2" in diameter. Use this blade to cut a slot in the head -- you will also have to slot the wedge. Beg, borrow, or buy an impact driver (see thread #1883). Set it to "Retract" and mount the small blade driver. Insert the driver in the slot and start by tapping the the impact driver with a hammer. Slowly increase the force behind the taps until the screw begins to move.

With all good wishes,

Yay! I got it out! Thanks for everyone's help!

Here's what happened--I tried using the screw extractor, but couldn't get it to seat in the bored hole. After two days of pouting, I went back out to the shop and tried boring deeper. Still no dice.

I then tried it on a scrap piece of wood and the extractor sat perfectly fine in that hole. So I tried again. And the head of the screw snapped off, releasing the wedge! (There didn't appear to be any damage to the wedge.)

Now I was stuck with just the shaft of the screw. I ran out to the hardware store and sprayed the whole cutter assembly with penetrating oil and let it set for an hour. Came back and after a hard turn with the pliers it came out by hand.

I took the whole jointer apart and cleaned it all up. Put it all back together with the new knives (minus one screw in one wedge) and gave it a whirl tonight. Seemed to be in working order.

Thanks everyone!