A diamond in the rough?

Here's an oldish Rockwell Unisaw that I picked up to replace my dead hybrid saw. He's got a couple things going for him; good blood-line, a lot of cast iron, reasonably  flat top, good arbour, good motor/switch. and some very sexy louvres. Not sure what happens next, but I'm sensing a paradigm shift. Perhaps a sliding table modification for a dedicated full capacity cross cutting machine with pinpoint accuracy...

Seems to be making perfect test cuts. Might be a sweet little rig until a true European slider miraculously lands in the shop one day. Of course a few days were spent going through him and doing a full tune-up. A few more days will be spent building in dust collection.

Don't forget to check the miter slot for parallelism at both 90 and 45, if they're not both parallel then the table needs shimming level. There's only one problem I could find with the saw: the flange on the arbour nut side was in very poor shape,perhaps not original, and not mating with the arbour flange on the inside, and distorting the blade. I lapped the nut flange which helped, then added a makeshift ply blade stiffener. Fortunately there's lots of old unisaw parts on ebay, and I bought a handwheel for the blade angle that was missing.