While I’m thankful to Tim for the good deal he gave me on his old table saw, I was never a huge fan of it. But some changes I’ve made to it over the past 6 months have made it one of my favorite tools in my shop:
- The dust collection system that I built does a great job at trapping saw dust. Unfortunately since it sits far away from my shop vac, I rarely have it hooked up. When the box gets full, I have to pull one end off to suck all the dust out. I think I’m going to rebuild this to be just a box with a drawer that I can pull out. Still, this works way better than having nothing.
- I waxed the top of the table saw. After I was done, I was shocked at how much easier wood slid across the blade.
- I bought a new blade! I don’t know how old/dull that other one was. I probably could have had it sharpened but I decided to start fresh and then keep it maintained.
- I adjusted the measuring guage on the fence. It was always off by enough that I had to measure with a tape measure to make sure it was set properly. Now it’s EXACTLY right and I can skip the tape measure.
- I got a good set of push blocks for Christmas which make it a lot safer to use.
The saw is pretty much still the same as it always was, but these cheap tweaks have made a huge improvement in its usefulness.