A couple weeks ago I was given an old Craftsman 6" jointer by an older
man in our church. It isn't a DJ-20, but it's a heck of a lot better
than what I can do with a hand plane. I set about trying to get this
thing into good working shape, first discovering that the blades had
evidently been sharpened on a grinder and had about a 1/4" dip end to
end, so were essentially useless. They were also seriously blued, so I
question their temper. Decided it was easy to just get replacements,
so did that. While waiting for the new blades to arrive I went out
this morning to try to clean up the tables a bit. It looks like it had
picked up some rust at one point and he had removed it with a circular
sander (not ROS, just a spinny disk thingy). The outfeed table isn't
too bad - mostly flat and cleaning up good, but the infeed is a bit
problematic.

First, it has some unevenness ground into it from the sanding,
probably 6-8 thou. That is probably small enough that I'm not going to
try to sand them out - they are only in spots and the basic bed is
mainly flat.

Second, and this is the thing that really concerns me, the infeed
table isn't parallel with the outfeed *side-to-side*. Along the length
it seems to be perfectly parallel, but if I make one edge even with
the outfeed the other edge is about 1/16" low. I haven't tried tearing
the whole thing apart to see if I can shim anything, since that will
take a lot of work, but I wondered if this discrepancy on the infeed
is really worth worrying about as long as the outfeed and fence are
good.

Ah, heck. After reading all that I'm going to tear it apart and see
how I can shim that thing level - there has to be a way somehow. If I
can make this work I'll consider it a gloat. If I spend money on
blades and time messing with it and it still doesn't work right I
guess it'll just be an anti-gloat.

--
"We need to make a sacrifice to the gods, find me a young virgin... oh, and bring something to kill"

Tim Douglass

http://www.DouglassClan.com