Jointer Knife Blade Maintenance

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Before you loosen or remove the jointer knives, lower the out-feed table and mark the wood as shown.
Usually the fence end of the knife will be less effected by wear and will give the most accurate setting.
If you remove the knives first you will lose the reference.
You will not be able to set the knives at the proper setting from the cutter-head and the in-feed table scale will be out of calibration.

I used this same technique for many years and it worked pretty well. Using a perfectly jointed piece of hardwood rather than a shim shingle, as shown in the video, for the wooden part of this method will help increase the accuracy.
This way of setting the knives is not even close to as accurate as using a dial indicator though, and once a person uses one to set their knives, I doubt they would ever go back to the stick method. With a dial indicator, the knives can be set to within 1 or 2 thousandths of each other and the outfeed table doesn't need to be reset.