ON TEST: Felder Format 4 Jointer
Review: Damion Fauser
This is Felder’s flagship jointer, and let me just say from the outset, it deserves the title. I’ve owned mine for around a year now and it has proven to be an exceptionally capable and accurate machine, significantly boosting my scale capability and productivity.
The planing surface is substantial, being able to process boards up to 510mm in width, but what I find more useful is the table length. At 3000mm total, and with the infeed table being 1650mm long, boards a little longer than 3200mm in length can self-balance on the infeed table without additional support. This has made processing those long and heavy boards so much easier for me.
Above: The fence is rigid and easy to move.
The fence is super accurate and has not shifted out of square once, even after being moved to any position on the table. The movement mechanism is a substantial piece of engineering, yet is smooth and easy to move with the ergonomic handle and locks rigidly in place with a simple turn of the kip- lock handle. Being a parallelogram mechanism, this allows the machine to be located tight against a wall regardless of the fence position, which can save a lot of space on the shop floor. The fence tilts easily between 90–45°, with adjustable positive stops at each end of that range.
The controls are clear and located at eye level on a post at the rear of the infeed table. Start-up is smooth with the proprietary Felder Star-Delta progressive powerup system.
Showing the control panel – effective and well located.
The height of the infeed table is electro-motively controlled with a fast movement up/down control knob and a fine-adjust button with a fidelity of 0.1mm, with the current setting displayed on a clear and bright LED readout. Whilst potentially not a feature required by everyone, this has proven to be extremely useful to me when performing tasks such as centring glue-lines in leg laminations or removing controlled amounts of material for generating tapers for example.
Above: The infeed table adjusts easily to create a concave or convex working surface.
The infeed table also adjusts for tilt in the horizontal plane to allow concave or convex machined surfaces, ideal for springing panel joints for example.
With a jointer as wide as this, consideration should be given to using a power feeder when working wider boards, or for situations where selecting a substantial cut depth (maximum cut depth for this machine is a significant 8mm) for both safety and accuracy. This machine is fitted with mounting points to make installation easier and also has an onboard 20amp, three-phase outlet for powering the feeder, meaning a secondary, dedicated power source is not required.
Dust control is generally very effective, with the fence swing-arm acting as a shroud to direct waste into the extraction port, which is 140mm wide and so can handle a serious volume of airflow. One little quirk I’ve noticed is that when processing narrower boards with the fence towards the front edge of the table surface, some of the waste isn’t extracted properly and instead ejects forwards onto the table surface behind the fence assembly. This is not really a show-stopper and could very well be due to my particular extraction set-up. When processing wider stock the chip collection is flawless.
The Euro-style overhead safety guard is segmented so it can fold down the front edge of the machine when the fence is closer to the front edge, meaning the operator doesn’t need to move around an extended fence as can happen with rigid Euro-style guards.
The table surfaces are beautifully ground and perfectly flat. Combined with the 120mm diameter cutterblock, this machine produces surfaces that are amazingly smooth and flat, requiring significantly less subsequent processing effort prior to either gluing or finishing.
The standard supplied motor is rated at 5.5kw which would be ample for most situations, but I opted for the larger 7.3kw motor for the volume of larger stock that I regularly process. This is a seriously capable machine for high-volume shops or for those who demand the very best.
Review machine supplied by author. More information at https://www.felder- group.com/en-au
Damion Fauser @damionfauser is a furniture designer maker and woodwork teacher in Brisbane.
Learn more at http://damionfauser.com/