Just a little info about a 4" jointer and wood warping.
Did you know that when a piece of wood is cut to 4" wide, the stresses are relieved and the wood, by and large, will no longer twist, cup, or warp? That is why it is best to make glued-up panels out of 4" wide boards.
I believe this is why Shopsmith feels they do not need to make the jointer they sell any wider than four inches. It would be easy for Shopsmith to make a wider jointer that fits on the Shopsmith (another company that makes a Shopsmith clone offers a 6" jointer with adapters that allow it to be used on a Shopsmith). But why? Most jointers are used for edge jointing anyway.
If you have gotten to a place in your woodworking where you are always needing to surface/face joint wood, then yes, it is time for a wider jointer, a much wider jointer. A 6" jointer doesn't offer enough of a difference to change from a 4" jointer. To surface-joint a board, it is best to a use a 10"-12" wide jointer. This size of jointer gives you the table surface you need to properly surface/face joint a board. When surface-jointing a board, you usually need to surface the board at an angle to the blades, especially hardwoods and highly figured wood. You really can't do this properly on 4" to 8" jointers, well maybe you can do some narrow boards on an 8". Four-inch jointers are great for edge jointing, but not surface/face jointing. And how many boards are you going to edge-joint that are wider than four inches?
And for edge jointing, the Shopsmith jointer is great. When I bought mine, it came with the conical sander and blade sharpener for free. This has saved me a lot of money in blade sharpening/blade replacement costs.
I bought an extra set of jointer blades so I can always have a sharp set ready to go. I have yet had to buy any more blades (four years and counting) because I have been able to sharpen the blades very easily with Shopsmith's sharpening system. You can also use the sharpening system to sharpen the planer blades, and other company's blades when set-up properly.
How many other companies offer you a system to sharpen their blades in your own shop. NONE! They either offer what they call disposable blades (because they offer no way of sharpening them) so you have to always spend more money on blades, or you need to take them to a place that sharpens blades. This can get a bit tedious, not to mention expensive, if you do a lot of woodworking. And then you have to keep extra blades in your shop (you never know when a blade will get a nick in it, ruining the cut), or hope the store has the blades you need in stock (another trip to Lowe's, yippy), or having to wait for your blades to be sharpened (2-3 days shop down time?). The machines that are sold at Lowe's, Home Depot and the like offer the machines with disposable blades. When you move up to Jet and Powermatic, those blades can be resharpened. But be careful, don't take your blades to any old blade sharpener. Make sure they they know how to sharpen the blades for your particular machine. If they don't, more than likely they will put the wrong grind/angle on the blades and make them useless.
For me, it only takes me five minutes take the blades out of my SS jointer, five minutes to set up my Shopsmith and sharpen both sets of my blades, and another 10 minutes to put a set of blades back in my jointer and adjust them. Twenty minutes well spent I think. And all at no cost except the twenty minutes it takes to get the job done.
Either though I have other tools, including a Jet 18" bandsaw I use for cutting bowl blanks out of burls (I need the extra resaw height, but still use my SS bandsaw for other work), the center of my woodshop revolves around all my Shopsmith tools and accessories. They fit perfectly in my shop, they are made with pride, and the quality is bar none some of the best woodworking tools out there.
Okay, I started this with the intention of posting just a little info I wanted to pass along, and now look at this post. I think I have written enough, for now.
