A Little Cross-Cutting Gem.

Here's the steel motor cover I made. I made some mounts so that it slides on and off in a second. Also the blade guard with dust hook-up that I made. A woodworking buddy kindly donated an Excalibur splitter to the cause, which made a good mounting point for the guard. Surprised the blade guard with dust hook up had to be a project from scratch involving lots of research and head scratching, there should be thousands of these coming out of China. I based mine on the Sharkguard and the Saw Stop guard, neither of which are readily available. It seems to be working well for cross-cutting and I'm happy with the dust collection. I mounted a chunk of aluminum on the miter guage T slot, to serve as a sled type fence. I made a shim and glued in to the beat up arbour nut flange after lapping it, so that it mates properly with the inside flange. It's not pretty but it works, the last picture shows the base I made for the bottom of the cabinet for dust collection, notice the top louvre was left open to create airflow. I also put some holes in the motor cover to help cool air wash over the motor, but sealed the gap between the cast table and cabinet with weatherstripping foam, and made magnetic covers for the blade angle & rear trunion slots. Lastly knocked up a bunch of zero clearance throat plates. Time to throw it into production.

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.

Moving On

The time has come to take down the shop drawings for the kitchen hutch project. and re-load.

Dreaming

Finally got round to copying these patterns & drawings that have been sitting under my bench for a long time. A Finn Juhl, armchair #45 I believe. I'd like to take a run at it sometime. In the meantime the drawings can make themselves comfortable in the bunkhaus kitchen to feed the inspiration.

Meanwhile the apres project shop tune-up continues

Perhaps the ghastliest chore, worse than resetting jointer knives, is the replacing or cleaning of the dust filters. Here's my system for filtering the cyclone exhaust (the exhaust enters the top of the box, and there's two exit ports underneath the filters). I took these filters outside and sprayed them down with compressed air. Just ugly. Then there's the various air filters which needed re-ordering or spraying down.

The jointer was also happy to see sharp knives installed.

So it's all ship shape, ready for the dining table project, except for the fatality of the table saw. Think the motor's gone. Maybe just the capacitors, but that's one difficult motor to get to and perhaps a sign to get an old piece of north american cast iron or something.

Invasive surgery complete

Wow. Pleasantly surprised with how much quiter it runs, it used to sound like a jet plane when I switched on the dust collector.

kitchen Hutch #1 - The Outlaw