u/hatesmakingusernames

I’m looking for experiences or thoughts on ordering large machines from Amazon. I’m looking to buy a Powermatic 8” Jointer, the parallelogram model PJ-882HH and surprisingly it’s available to purchase on Amazon. But I’ve never ordered anything that large or that requires freight delivery from Amazon before and I’m not sure about it.

I’ve had several freight deliveries to my house before but I usually order direct from the manufacturers (Grizzly a couple times, and Puma for a 60 gallon compressor). All were shipped via TForce freight, which I honestly don’t love because they’re communication/scheduling is bad. You can tell they’re more set up for business/commercial customers than residential (always ask for business name and operating hours and I have to remind them I’m just a guy with a house). Ive usually had to call a couple times and remind them to schedule my delivery. But the actual deliveries have worked fine. They have lift gate and while it says curbside, they put it on a pallet jack and into my garage (easy driveway access).

Ordering from Amazon is attractive because their tracking is usually better, although I think they use 3rd-party carriers for freight anyway (possibly TForce?). And it’s just more familiar. But I’m worried that because it’s not really the sort of thing that’s Amazon’s main focus either. I’ve heard their curbside is ACTUALLY curbside, which would be a problem as the jointer shipping weight is almost 800 lbs. I could rent a pallet jack but that’s a pain. I also expect Amazon will put more responsibility on the seller, which actually appears to be Powermatic anyway, so I could just be adding extra complication for no reason.

If anyone has tried ordering full size machines from Amazon, I’d love to hear your experience. This is obviously a big purchase and I want to make sure I do what I can to make it go well.

I just received a Laguna resaw king and put it on my Grizzly 17” 2 hp bandsaw (also newish - new to me and guy I bought it from never actually used it). I thought I got it set up right but it has a consistent chatter when it’s running and I’m not sure if something is off. Blade tension is tight - tighter than I usually like but it seemed to help. Pretty sure it’s tracking right - not a lot of room for error since the blade is so big it covers most of the tire. Had ball bearing guides all in close but not touching, but the blade was making contact with the bearings right away without anything touching the blade so I backed them off. Should I move them back in? If I do, the blade seems to contact constantly, which I thought wasn’t right. Seems like it’s chattering almost like tension is too low, but it’s pretty high. I’ve been hesitant to tension higher worried it’d cause a catastrophic failure or something.

I’ve attached a video to give an idea of what I’m hearing and seeing. Am I worrying over nothing or is something off? This is my second bandsaw and I’ve resawed with other blades before, but this is a saw I’ve had for like 2 weeks and I’ve never used a carbide tipped blade before. So both were new to me and expensive so I don’t want to break them. Blade actually works great even with that chatter. Function seems fine but if something isn’t right that won’t last long and could get dangerous. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Ordering large machines on Amazon

New Resaw King Blade - does this sound normal?