The Helical head has been specially made for JET by BYRD, the original inventors of the helical style head. It comes with 56 carbide inserts along four rows. The carbide has a hardness of 95 Rc and will last almost twenty times as long as a standard HSS blade. This generates about a quarter of the noise energy, making it a perfect machine for those people who have an issue with machinery noise.

Another advantage of the helical head is the smooth finish that the blades leave and the huge reduction in tearout of difficult grain, compared to normal blade machines. When an insert is damaged you only need to replace that particular one. The dust extraction hose is positioned to remove even the tiniest chips from fine cuts leaving the surface of your timber blemish free.

One of the most appealing features is a single action opening of the jointer tables when changing modes. Simply undo the eccentric lock and the whole jointer assembly remains intact and lifts up to 90°. The whole operation takes a matter of seconds and your jointer setting remains undisturbed.

The cast iron jointer tables are precision machined to allow your material to slide across the surface with very little resistance. Both the infeed and outfeed tables are adjustable. With a helical head machine the outfeed table is adjusted to the blades, not the other way round as with a traditional cutterhead machine.

The precision fence is extruded aluminium that has been milled to ensure a flat surface. It is fully adjustable to any angle. There are stops at 45° and 90°.

The thicknesser table height adjustment runs on a single, large diameter centre column, providing full support where it’s most needed, directly under the cutterhead.

Two rubber feed rollers are designedto prevent any end snipe, there is no movement at all in the table or the timber as the pressure changes from one roller to another. There is a digital readout on the height winder for accurate adjustment.

An important safety feature is the microswitches on the dust guard and the jointer table to prevent the machine being switched on whilst the blades are exposed.

JET Machinery is subject to rigorous factory checks to ensure that the quality of the finished product is consistently of the highest standard. This machine is no exception and although fine tuning is very easy, there is little need to do anything as it has been so well prepared before it leaves the factory.

There is no doubt that the JET-JPT310HH is a beautiful machine, it is extremely well finished and has loads of power in its 3HP motor. As a combination machine it really does give you the best of both worlds.