Back in action

After finally beating the unnamed, undiagnosed illness, I'm back in the shop again.

I have a couple of new toys to play with now. I bought a 12 1/2" Delta Planer, which makes a huge
difference in the quality of fit, ring to ring. It also saves a lot of time, as I don't have to spend hours
running the individual rings through my home made drum sander. A couple of high speed passes
through the planer's blades does the trick.

I also replaced my tired old table saw. When I began my search for a new saw, I really wanted to buy a belt driven saw, because they are much quieter and smoother cutting. However, their cost is prohibitive. Most prices start at $500+ and go up from there.

So I had to look at saws that had the blade mounted directly on the motor. As I researched saws, I could see that many were simply a repackaged version of my old saw. I found one at Sears that seemed to have a lot of features such as extendable wings that allow for large panels to be handled and a quick release system for removing the blade guard. The price was in line with what I had budgeted, so that is the model I bought.

After I got it home and out of the box, I quickly discovered that while the features were good, the engineering was terrible. When I put the blade on the motor, it rubbed on the motor mount. Not good. I had to find a spacer to move the blade away from the motor mount. That meant that the blade guard/riving knife were no longer in alignment with the blade. So that had to be adjusted with spacers. The blade wouldn't adjust to a true 90 degrees, so I had to modify the motor mount. It was also out of square with the table top.

After spending the better part of two days re-engineering the saw, I finally achieved reasonable accuracy. It still needs some tweaking, but overall it now works fine.

Nothing like high quality Chinese engineering. Makes one wonder how anything in their country works.