What would be a good method of telling you when your joiner and planer knives were sharpened as well as your saw blades?

Write the date on saw blades with a sharpie. Close to the arbor so it won't wear off. But, a blade will tell you when it's time.

As to planer blades, I change them as needed, regardless of the calendar.

Does it scratch your fingernail?

wood looks like it was torn and not shaved...

The edge would be free of nicks and you could slice a tomato for your sammich.

I write the date on a piece of masking tape and attach it to my machine so then I know when they were last sharpened.

After some years in the shop you can listen to the machine while jointing and tell if dull or not----also one can feel the dull blade effect while moving the wood past the cutter----works for me.

Put a serial number on each piece, keep an "equipment history" journal and track by serial number.

 

But only if a particular piece of equipment's history is of any value, otherwise this would be "overkill"...  I will freely admit (before anybody else accuses me of same) overkill can easily win on this one.

 

Secenario...Lil' Nicky gets his blades sharpened...writes it in his Bk/Wh composition book.  Uses the newly sharpened blades for a couple of months, sharpens them again.  This time they last 8 months...Lil' Nicky believes it's because of the new sharpener he bought.  It's so good that he buys another one, figures the blades will last twice as long.  Pretty soon Lil' Nicky is sharpening everything in sight.  His composition book is now getting harder to manage.  So he starts to use a three ring binder...easier to add and remove pages...also to categorize things he's sharpened.  Soon he runs out of index sheets because of all the things he's categorized and gets a bigger binder with more index sheets.  he finds that he now has to build a table of contents so he can quickly find the right data about the right piece of equipment.  Lil' Nicky gets a bright idea to reorganize...so he sets about to alphabetize the index sheets in the three ring binders...quite the job because now the index sheets are not in order and so he has to move them around...and keep the colors straight.  He quickly recognizes that it would be nice to type the labels in the sheets so he buys a label printer.  And adds the printer to the inventory.  Now he has to move all the index sheets again because he's added the printer as a category that he didn't have before.

 

Lil' Nicky's friend, Lil' Billy, tells him to computerize...so he buys a laptop and the newest version of Windoze Office suite and builds himself an Excel spreadsheet and immediately starts the process of transcribing all the pen/ink data into the spreadsheet.  Lil' Nicky starts to become an Excel spreadsheet guru...before long he was making pivot tables, scorecards, graphs, bar charts...and he could see with the click of the mouse exactly when he last did some thing to some piece of equipment of his.  Soon, he was building spreadsheets and reports for all his woodworker friends and eventually moved the entire operation to Microsoft Access with a SQL database as the engine.

 

Now that he was computerized he could see that sharpenings were becoming fewer and farther between.  He decided this was a good thing as he had made improvements in his sharpenings and could see that his equipment was needing less and less maintenance.  He boasted to all how computerizing the operation allowed him to see just how well maintenance was working.  He thanked Lil' Billy for the lead and gave him his Bosch 4100 table saw as he wasn't using it that much anyway.

 

Lil' Nicky then decided to capture the cost of each of the pieces of equipment he was tracking.  This was very helpful as he could tell what to sell the equipment for so as not to lose too much money.  WOW...this computerized stuff is really something.

 

Before long, he realized that some of the equipment was gathering dust and started to sell more and more.  And especially as he wasn't using it as much anymore.  After all, he was now building databases for all his friends and finally got a chance to license his programs to other members of his woodworking forums.  Lil' Nicky soon realized that his database building business was really picking up.  He would soon need bigger servers, a web site, paid more money to get higher in the Google Search engines...business was booming ! ! ! ! !

 

...was that a used super computer on Craigslist...

 

...you can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant...

I was w/ you till you gave away the 4100...

there are professionals out there that can help...

shoulda stuck w/ the 3x5 card taped to the machine...

Whew, I'm wore out ,have to take a nap after all that work. Sounds like the company I worked for, tracked everything, Had a whole staff tracking things, and you could never get anything without fighting your way through the tracking system and proving why you needed it.

Herb