As long as we're tearing the Delta Jointer apart....

Replacing the bearings in the jointer still didn't fix the problem of the sagging infeed table. 

Honestly, it was just one corner of the table that we couldn't adjust up any more, 

despite rotating the adjustment bushings. When you have a sagging corner on the infeed table, your jointed boards will have a hollow in between the boards you're trying to glue together. Conversely, if the back corners are too high, you'll have gaps on the ends of your  seams, not in the middle. Either way, you're looking for a nice seam, with no gaps, so adjustments become necessary from time to time. 

When you loosen the set screws, you can rotate the eccentric bushings to raise or lower the corners of the table.

(Warning - there are TWO set screws locking each bushing in place, so take out the first one, and loosen the second one.)  

When we couldn't adjust the table any higher, a little research led me to think that I possibly could add a shim to the dovetail ways, which are below the tables. A shim would raise the table up a bit, and allow the beds to raise or lower back to parallel. Over time, the dovetails wear, so adding a shim can help get them back to factory tolerances. 

Well....

Not. Going. To. Happen.

As it turns out, there aren't any dovetail ways in this jointer... so that solved that problem!

Instead a call to Delta's tech support team led us in another direction - pulling the jointer off of the base and inspecting the plates underneath, to see if they were bent. 

It really wasn't that difficult to flip it over - remove the eight Allen head bolts that were accessible from the base and find someone strong to help.  It's pretty heavy.

I suspect that sawdust might be 25 years old! 

When you're working with a former Army mechanic, you realize their first inclination is to take the whole damn thing apart, piece by piece. 

So we did. 

Everything came off, from the indeed and outfield beds, to the plates, the adjustment handles... everything.

If you have a poor memory, take some photos of what you're doing, so you'll remember how to re-assemble it.  

This spring was a challenge - not only to remove, but also to re-install. 

Honestly, the only parts that seemed damaged where these bushings, 

which showed some internal wear, so we rotated them into different positions. These bushings are obsolete, so coaxing more life out of them was our goal. 

Bobby, the Delta techie, had mentioned the plates a few times, and was worried that they might be bent. We were scratching our heads, trying to find them, but as it turns out - they were the small, thick plates of metal that hold the brackets to the shafts. Almost easy to miss. 

These plates are small, but very beefy, and I understand why Bobby said he hoped they weren't bent. They'd be almost impossible to flatten!

Here is the shaft without the plates, 

and here are the two plates bolted into place. 

In the end, rotating the bushings did the trick for us - allowing us to make the coplanar adjustment to the tabletops, and get everything back to working order.  We reassembled everything,  trued up the fence, and all that was left was installing a set of sharp blades.

All in all, this teardown only took a few hours, and on a scale of one-ten, I'd say it was about a solid FOUR on the difficulty scale. You definitely need some muscle to flip the planer beds over, but mechanically, this wasn't that tough. If you can replace the brakes in your truck, you can easily do this repair.