On Feb 4, 9:41 am, "Dick Snyder" wrote:
I recently bought a used jointer so I don't have a lot of experience using a
jointer yet. This is a "newbie" question.

I needed a little extra mahogany to make the legs of the third and final
table in a set of stacking tables I am making. I had a left over mahogany
2x4 so I cut a 24" piece off of it. When I put it down on a flat surface I
could see that there was a twist in the wider (3 1/2") side of the board. If
I pushed on opposite corners at each end of the 24" piece it would rock. I
thought I could flatten it with my jointer so I made a number of very fine
passes. I had scribbled pencil marks on the side I was passing over the
jointer knives so I could see when the knives had gotten everything. After
awhile I saw that while I was flattening the wide piece of the board, it was
not square to the thinner (1 1/2") edge. In fact one thinner edge was wider
than the opposing edge. I'm guessing I was pushing down on the twist in
different ways when I passed it through the jointer. Should I have ripped
the 2x4 into separate smaller pieces so that the twist was not so dramatic?
Then I could run each piece thru the jointer and glue them back up. I'm not
sure what I should have done. Your help would be appreciated.

TIA.

Dick Snyder

I don't think you need to worry about your edges being different
widths yet, because you still need to plane the non-jointed face.
Ripping a twisted workpiece can be exciting on a tablesaw, less so on
a bandsaw. The generally accepted method is to face-joint, then edge-
joint with the newly jointed face against a 90 degree fence, plane the
opposite face in your planer, then rip the remaining edge parallel to
the jointed edge. There are other orders of work you might employ if
the grain is wonky, e.g. face-joint, plane, edge-joint, rip. You'll
get it. HTH Tom