Carbatec 8" industrial Jointer CTJ-350X

[Yanis]

This is the Carbatec 8" industrial jointer. I bought this jointer second hand. It was a straight blade but the owner retrofitted a spiral head which made it identical the the CTJ-350X model. The jointer was still in pretty good conditionand had clearly not been used much. It had very little wear and was near new condition. One of the bits had to be rotated since it had a small nick.

The jointer has a 8" spiral head, not helical which is a small disadvantage since in theory it will not cut quite as clean in difficult grain. It has the 1.5 HP motor which can be felt when trying to joint wide harder wood boards. The bed length is excellent and can accommodate all but the longest of boards. For average woodworking it is well long enough. I managed to joint some 50x 200 x 2,000 mm boards using a material handing roller off the end of the jointer which is probably as big as you would want to go, maybe a little too big to be honest. The Carbatech CTJ-350X is identical to the Grizzly G0490X (http://www.grizzly.com/products/8-Jointer-w-Spiral-Cutterhead/G0490X) except for the motor which is 3 HP on the Grizzly.

As it came the jointer was perfectly aligned with the beds exactly parallel and the head set correctly so I did not need to perform any adjustments. We used a truck with a lifter on it and we treated it as gently as we could. Being a parallel bed jointer the adjustments should be very precise and be stable but I have not had to adjust them yet. If you do, remember that you have grub screws on top of grub screws. You need to remove the grub screws completely to reveal the inner grub screws. This is not in the Carbatech manual but is mentioned in the Grizzly manual.

It comes with castors standard. You depress a pedal to lift it onto the castors then flip the pedal back to lower it onto the stop. It is nice and stable when lowered but the fall is somewhat severe and does not feel comfortable. However when lifted it moves quite easily so is easy to move around.

In service it produces a very clean almost finish ready surface on straight grain wood and even slightly difficult hard wood. However on softwoods like pine where you have reversing grain I have noticed some tear out but that is to be expected.

I have several minor niggles. The first is that the fence is a right royal pain to set at exactly 90 deg. It has a 90 and 45 indent but when I used the 90 indent there was a small amount of light under my square which makes it annoyingly out of flat when doing panel glueups. One could reverse joint opposite faces but one would like 90 deg to actually be 90 deg. Second the fence does not quite go to the end of the head. This means that it will not joint the full 8", it is about 1/4"-3/16" short. Finally the dust extraction is not really efficient. Others have modded the under cabinet metalwork to make extraction better. You cannot run it without extraction since the shavings will not clear by themselves and it does make a lot of shavings. I have an old Jet portable single bag unit powered by a 1.5 HP motor which clears the shavings but does leave a small amount in the bottom. The manual is rubbish. If you go the the Grizzly site you can download the manual for the Grizzly jointer which is far more comprehensive than the Carbatech manual.


Overall this unit is very good value for money if you are buying new but I got it at a very good price second hand so I am really pleased with my purchase. This is an example of you get exactly what you pay for. It is an excellent choice for the hobbyist like me and gives excellent results. You cannot do really heavy cuts but that is not an issue for me. If I were to buy again this would be at the top of my list, even if I had to buy it new.

Pros

Good value for money
Bits last a very long time unless you chip them (get a metal detector if using reclaimed timber)
Sufficient power for light cuts on the hardest wood
Good long bed
Portable
Only need a 10A circuit
Dust extraction built in
Parallelogram beds


Cons

Owner's manual is rubbish
Cannot get the full width of the head
the 90 deg stop is not 90 deg
Dust extraction is not perfect
Fence angle adjustment is extremely sensitive
Motor is under-powered for the unit


In conclusion although this is advertised as an industrial jointer I would shell out the extra $1k or so for a high end jointer if I was a professional. However is is perfectly fine for the weekend wood worker and for a spiral head parallelogram jointer excellent value for money. The only mod I may consider is replacing the motor with a 3 HP unit.

[skot]

Yanis,

Query:
The parallelogram bed means that the bed adjusts up/down in an arc over the cutters so as to not have a large gap between bed & cutter...is this correct ?

[Yanis]

Yanis,

Query:
The parallelogram bed means that the bed adjusts up/down in an arc over the cutters so as to not have a large gap between bed & cutter...is this correct ?

Yes correct. The edge of the in-feed table remains at a constant distance from the cutter head as the table moves up and down.

John

[Yanis]

Edited the review somewhat to add some additional detail, correct some syntax and clarify some points.

[P.W.H.]

Mine was bought new a few months back, it's less'n a year old. I can get the fence retracted right past the edge of the outfeed table, which is actually not a good thing, the manager of the Carbatec shop in Auckland advised me that the edge of the fence should ride on the outfeed table to support its considerable weight, but you might want to look at how the fence is mounted on yours, you may be able to adjust it so it can move further outwards. Look for stops that are incorrectly set maybe (it's dark, I am not about to go out into the workshop to check mine out now).
I reckon I can get the full width of the knives - not that I'll be planing something 200 wide very often.

Adjusting the fence to a precise 90 is extremely finicky, mostly due to the weight of the thing. The indent in the cam for the 90 degree setting can be adjusted by loosening a grub screw and turning the cam. On my first fence that was very easy to do. On my new fence (just got the first one exchanged because it was hollow in the centre) the cam is incredibly stiff and I had to use a cold chisel as a drift to move it. Not really that good, ha! Some kind of fine adjustment with a nut running on a threaded rod would be a great addition. I'm going to have to put my thinking cap on. That lever on the fence is just way too crude to make the final adjustment.

Agree that the manual is complete rubbish, and the chute for the shavings is fairly awful. My 650W dusty could not be counted on to clear it, I severally had to take the front of the base and stick my tentacles in there to try to manually move the chips down the chute (trust me, you need a tentacle with about 3 joints to get in there comfortably with your hand). Yeesh. The chute on mine is 3 sided, open top, tack welded into the cabinet with no way of detaching or moving or clearing it easily.
My new Jet Vortex dusty doesn't seem to have a problem clearing shavings, however.

Agreed on the paperwork: complete rubbish. They were under the impression at the store that there would be a wonderful assembly instruction booklet in the box when I got it home - but there was nothing of the kind. I also have a real problem with the way it was put together in China. The bolts of the motor weren't tightened, so they fell out into the container. The one bolt that persisted made sure that the weighty motor totally bent the struts inside the base. Incidentally, a similar thing happened when I got my new 15" thicknesser home: we had not even unloaded it from the trailer when my wife went: "oh, look, there's some nuts and bolts coming out of the bottom of the container!" -- in this case it turned out to be the bolts that should've secured the machine to the container. Carbatec REALLY needs to give those guys in China a rev-up over that sort of thing.

I also needed an express lesson in how to true up the tables on the machine. Another trip to Auckland, since I hadn't thought to find the video on youtube by some Mr Woodwhisperer ... again, a decent manual would've saved gas, a couple of days wasted and a fair bit of diesel.

I would not mind a spiral head, but I decided to get the spiral head for the thicknesser instead, since I tend to make all my final cuts on that machine. The money tree in the garden has run out of foliage.

[Yanis]

Thanks PWH, good tips. I think it may be the way the guy mounted the spiral head, not sure, but I would at least like to get the full head's thickness. The 8" boards I flattened had a ridge down the edge which I cleared with a hand plane. Not really a bid deal I suppose.

Nice tip with the indent as well. I'll have a look see. I can im agine it would take a lot of patience to get the indent correct. Phew!

The wood whisperer aka Mark Spagnolo has done some great videos. I subscribe to both his video and audio podcast he does with Matt and Shannon. His machine tune up videos are excellent.

The dust extraction is marginal. It works, only just, with my Jet but it does leave a small pile at the bottom near the outlet but if I let the bag get too full the whole underside just fills up. My thicknesser has an ejection fan and if I leave extraction off it spews shaving half way across the (rather large) shed. Not as bad as the old jet table saw though.

John