Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark Hatcher
One hand powered tool that I have found immensely helpful for this type of precision cut is the Bridge City Jointmaker Pro.
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It's interesting to see how you implement hand tools. Thanks for sharing that.
While I don't want to derail your thread, I did want to say that I owned a Jointmaker Pro for about a decade. I eventually sold it at considerably less than I paid for it and was happy to see it go. As a woodworker, guitar maker and design engineer, I found that while the "upside down saw" is a clever concept, it was incredibly badly implemented on a variety of fronts.
I have owned a number of Bridge City Tool Company tools, many of which I've sold. My experience is that their designers really didn't understand how to make functional mechanisms - their tools that have no moving parts are very nice.
For those interested in the Jointmaker Pro, Bridge City Tool Company was purchased a few years ago by the Chinese company Harvey. Since then the same Bridge City tools, including the Jointmaker Pro, are no longer made in the U.S., instead now made in China. The manufacturing quality appears to be no worse for having done so, but the retail prices of their tools have dropped by half or more. Lee Valley is again selling their tools, including the Jointmaker Pro.
What is so surprising to me is that despite there being a lot of initial publicity about the Jointmaker Pro, those that have them virtually never talk about them. There are only a few - literally three or so - videos on the internet by owners. There is no mention of them on Internet forums. Hence, doing an internet search yields little result.
One of the few ventures was by one of the well-known American woodworking schools who purchased a number of Jointmaker Pros. They then advertised a two-week (paid) seminar in how to use them and that the outcome of that seminar would be a book on all of the wonderful things that could be done with the Jointmaker Pro. The book was never published and nothing was ever heard from again regarding the Jointmaker at that school.
Its an odd mystery that those who spent thousands of dollars on one never talk about them. This is the first time I've seen any owner actually talk about having one, save the few YouTube videos of people doing introductory stuff with it that a handsaw would do faster and easier and with as much accuracy. Even in the days before the company was purchased, and they had their own discussion forum, almost all of the discussion regarding the Jointmaker Pro was from people with setup and performance issues, not people showing all of the things they had done with it.