plumb bob will work if it is on a truly level surface to begin with (don't
have any of those in my garage/workshop so can't help you with that). I'd
rely on hand turning by sight and skip the micrometer...it is a jointer, not
a space shuttle. Level the feet as best you can to eliminate any rocking
and take it from there. There is enough cast iron on the bed and fence to
do what it supposed to do and you should devote your time to those instead
of some minor vibration. As for poor quality belt, it will work just
fine...its only purpose is to drive power from the motor to the cutter head.
If you get the alignment reasonably close, it will "forgive" the rest. If
way too out of line you can kiss your cutterhead bearings "bye-bye" but I
think that would be a tough act to do.

"Darrell Dorsey" wrote in message
...
Just purchased this jointer and am very happy with what I've gotten.

The performance has been excellent. I placed the order on last Monday, it
arrived at the carriers on Thursday morning and I went a picked it up on
Friday afternoon. There would have been an extra charge for a lift gate
truck and I have a long driveway on a cul-du-sac, and I doubt they would
have backed the truck up to my garage.

But to my question. Everything went together very easily, the fit and
finish is good. But I had trouble aligning the motor drive pulley with
the
cutter head pulley.

The manual says to make a plumb bob (which I did) or use a straight edge.
There is not enough room to use my 2" X 24" precision straight edge. And
because the pulleys are not plumb to each other, I could only use the
plumb
bob on one edge of the pulleys. I had to shift the motor drive pulley in
some (as instructed). For now the pulleys are close, but I have no way to
determine if the two pulleys are actually planner (like on my bandsaw).
So
far it seems to be running well, but there is a little vibration (I
believe
that most of this is due to poor quality belts)..

How have some of you insured that your pulleys on these machines are lined
up properly. I've sent this same message to Grizzly tech support, so far
they have been good about answering my questions before the purchase. But
I
wanted to get a jump on your thoughts.

Before the machine arrived, I down loaded the latest manual from the
Grizzly
site. In hindsight, the manual only mentions using a straight edge to
align
the pulleys. The interesting thing is that the jointer arrived with an
older manual (one for a GW1018, + a parts list insert for the GW1018HW).
This manual was not as good as the latest, but it did have better
instructions (use a plumb bob) for aligning the pulleys.

Also the belts that came with this machine are terrible. The machine uses
two 3L520 belts. They don't seem to match very well. It appears that
they
both are not tensioned the same. There are some wide lumps where the
belts
are connected. And they already seems to have a bit of set to them. I
have
been using the power twist belts on my Jet contractors saw and on a jet
band
saw, as well as on my old Delta 6" jointer. After researching and reading
a
lot of the recent post, about link belts, I had decided to use the
supplied
belts. But it seems these belts need to be replaced.

Thanks again for your advice.

Darrell