Review: Grizzly G0452 Part 1

I took delivery of the Grizzly G0452 last week, and am happy to report only minor problems with everything so far. UPS freight didn’t provide a lift gate, which I had paid extra for, but the driver was nice enough to give me a hand with the two boxes. This did however provide me with a chance to test Grizzly’s customer service. I’m delighted to report that they are both responsive and courteous. There’s little doubt in my mind that they’ll get me a refund for the cost of the lift gate.

Anyway on to the jointer itself. As I said it come in two boxes: roughly 22x17x29 and 48x21x14. The smaller box contains the base and most of the nuts and bolts, while the larger houses the jointer itself along with the fence and handles. It’s worthwhile to note that neither box, although heavy, is really worthy of lift gate service; so if I had to do everything again I think I would simply skip the extra cost. Packaging seemed ample and well thought out. No pieces were marred or dented in any serious way.

The instructions to put the unit together are at times slightly incorrect (regarding hex bolt head size or example) but seemed adequate to me. You can download the instructions ahead of time from Grizzly’s website if you want to study up a bit before delivery. One thing I would add to the list of tools is a box of rags to wipe the grease and oil from the parts. This stuff is necessary to protect the iron during storage and transport, but takes a bit of work to get off. I used CMT bit cleaner to do a final wipe down of all the parts that will be handled or will contact the workpiece. After assembly I protected the machined surfaces with a coat of sliding lubricant.

I’m now in the process of tuning the machine up to work on some projects. So far, so good.

Here’s a LINK which may be somewhat useful to anyone tuning up their jointer. Keep in mind that he appears to be using a parallelogram jointer, which is very different than something like the G0452 which rides on dovetails.