Review of the Jet JJP-8BT 8-Inch Bench Top Jointer/Planer
Great for Small Workshops
Like most people would like to have both a planer and a jointer in my workshop, unfortunately I don’t have the space or the money for both. This is why I decided to get the Jet JJP-8BT which combines both a jointer and a planer. I read a lot of reviews of it and although they tended to be somewhat mixed I decided that for my needs it was a good choice, this is my review of my experiences.
After comparing prices on Jet planers I decided to get mine from Amazon since they had the lowest price by a fair amount. Once it arrived I had to get it set up, this proved to be a challenge. There is a lot of assembly required and it is not at all clear how the thing goes together. The instruction manual is little help and in truth is surprisingly poorly written. In the end I had to call Jet customer service for help in getting things set up, they were very helpful. One other issue that came up during the set up process is that the Jet strongly advise having a dust collection system which they do not include with the product so I had to make arrangements for this. They say a shopvac will work fine but I ultimately went out and bought a four inch dust collection system.
After getting everything set up I made my first cut with my Jet JJP and found that it worked better than I was expecting. Based on some of the reviews that I had read I was a little bit worried about this. To be sure the cut quality was not the same as you would get from a good quality stand alone bench top planer let alone a full size jointer but it was decent. As long as you go slow and don’t try to take too much off on each pass it works fine. I did have a bit of an issue with the feed tables, both the in and out feed tables are very short. While this does help to save on the amount of space that the machine takes up it does make using it a bit of a hassle with larger pieces.
Overall I am quite happy with my 
