NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1983, No. 43, $3.50 Making ... - Wood Tools

NOTES AND COMMENT
Have you outgrown
your old tablesaw?
Here at
"Which
Fine Woodworking, we've been
planning for years to tackle the question,
is the best tablesaw?"
One time, we even asked readers to
write and tell what they thought, but
because
r
of so many different expectations,
there seemed to be no clear answer.
In my own 15 years of feeding
sawblades, the real question has turned
out to be, " What do I want my tablesaw
to do?" Here's my sawdusty tale­
d enjoy hearing from readers with their
own viewpoints, whether the same as
mine or different. Maybe we can sift out
and print some universal ttuths after all.
When I bought into my picture framing
shop, there was a lO-in. Sears
Craftsman tablesaw sitting in the back,
and it stayed there for 11 years-ripping
moldings, making miters, dadoing, cutting
the occasional plywood, being an
extra workbench, and doing all the daily
chores a frame shop could ask of it.
The saw helped me make my living
for a long time, but I never actually
liked it, if you know what I mean. For
as long as I can remember, it had an annoying
click in its arbor bearing, al-
Feeling the wood
in Eugene, Oregon
For three days in June, the public in Eugene,
Ore., got a close look at what 15
local woodworkers can offer as alternatives
to mass-produced furnishings. The
show's success stemmed from its informal
atmosphere, which permitted a
browser to measure a chair's comfort
with his back and inspect the finish on a
so ftly rounded corner with his hand.
102
Brad lies drew his contemporary walnut
credenza out of the familiar, classical
cabriole curve. The piece is 55 in. long.
though this didn't affect the cutting.
About monthly the arbor pulley would
work loose, and several times a year I
would have to crawl around under the
thing to remove sap and gum which
were preventing the arbor from reaching
a full 450 or a full 900• It seemed to me
that the saw (ould have been designed .
to avoid both chores. In addition, I was
never able to get the blade to stay parallel
to the table grooves. I recently
learned that I could have
fix
cured this by
spending a couple of bucks on betterquality
ttunnion bolts, a that would
never have occurred to me then.
When I had the opportunity to buy a
junked building for a new shop, I figured
that I could buy a new saw to help
with renovations, and then sell the old
saw when I moved. Naturally, I bought
another Sears, the $449 "best" model
at its perpetual sale price of $ 100 off.
Tolerances had changed a little. Although
my oId miter gauges fit one table
groove, I had to file out the other to
accept them. I was a little disturbed that
the new saw had angle-iron guides for
the rip fence instead of the old saw's
rack-and-pinion, and that the guides
didn't extend all the way across the
front of the saw so that I could rip on
Nothing was roped off, and only delicate,
turned miniatures were set behind
glass. Streams of people tested and inspected
the furniture and artwork.
Enough of them lingered to buy and to
commission new work for the organizers
to consider their efforts worthwhile. The
juried show, held at the Hilton Hotel,
was put together by the Willamette
Valley Fine Woodworking Association,
PO Box 3010, Eugene, Ore. 97403.
-Ellen Frances, Eugene, Ore.
either side of the blade, but I later added
angle iron of my own, which worked
pretty well. It took about five hours to
ftle the groove, set up the vertical and
angle adjustments, and true up the rest
of the saw. A week later I noticed that
the blade hadn't stayed parallel to the
table grooves. And the motor wasn't up
to heavy work-the overload protector
kept shurting it down, despite my efforts
to pace myself. One day it took
three hours to cool off.
After a solid month of ripping up old
wood for worktables, shelves and partitions,
I heard the first ominous grumble
from the bearing. It got worse by the
hour. Sears explained that if I was using
the saw professionally they couldn't
honor the guarantee, and I explained
that for $9 it wasn't worth the hassleall
I wanted was a new bearing. Changing
the bearing took all Saturday.
That saw built my new shop, and
after the move, it made a lot of picture
molding besides. But about this time I
began to get interested in general woodworking,
and here my new saw let me
down. It had gobbled up sugar pine,
but it balked at cherry, walnut or maple
in any reasonable size. It just plain
would not rip green wood. Ripping a
Frank Mitchell
insists that
his wooden clocks
tell time, and to
make sure they
do, he uses brass
pivots in lignum
vitae bushings.
Phoros this page: Hugh
G. Banoo