How to Clean and Calibrate a Jobsite Tablesaw - Tablesaw Tune-up and Maintenance

alright guys welcome back to the Trey and today we are gonna be doing something I've been wanting to do for a long time which is a complete table saw maintenance and tune-up as well as changing out the blades so currently I've just got this old raggedy blade that came with the saw and it is dull and gets pretty terrible cuts and so what we're going to be installing is this froid combo blade so this is a 24 tooth this is a 62 that's going to help getting cleaner cuts for some of these projects I'm doing but then the other thing is this actually alternates teeth one of them is just your standard beveled tooth but then the tooth behind it on in front of it is a flat round tooth and so I'm going to be able to get flat ground cuts which is gonna be great for doing dedos and rabbits and other joinery so really excited to get this in here so the various thing we're first thing we're gonna do before we do any sort of calibration the table saw is just go ahead and switch this blade out alright guys so I just wanted to point out a couple good references for when you're doing any sort of maintenance of course is the user manual for your tool you can find lots of things on YouTube online but in my opinion nothing beats you know physical print copies of information especially from manufacturers so I'm gonna be going through this as well as this book by John white he's one of the shop managers over at fine woodworking and he has this book it's really comprehensive on shot mechanics and goes over a lot of the methods used for calibrating all sorts of different shot machines so we're going to be using his methods for calibrating this once the blades installed so I just wanted to kind of show those so what means is gonna change for every table saw and every manufacturer I'm going to be going over kind of the steps for this Dewalt kind of job site table saw and just a good tip it does include of course the wrenches used to remove and change the blade they're contained right on the side here behind the wing nut so first thing we're going to do is just take off the throat plate here make sure your machine is powered off obviously before you do any sort of maintenance inside and then from here we're just going to take out the splitter or the riving knife and that's pretty simple there's just this three-pronged knob here and we're just gonna loosen that up now once you have this knob here completely loosened what you're gonna do is just push in on it and take out the knife okay so with the riving knife and throw plate removed we can just go ahead and loosen the nut over the arbor plate here and then we're gonna take this blade out and do a bit of cleaning okay well that took a bit of convincing and had the upgrade wrenches here but finally did get it loose so that we can just finish taking off this nut there and make sure you be careful you don't lose this flat washer down in there so you see we've got the arbor washer here and the blade and with everything removed from the table saw including the opponents on the side here we're going to use this time to go ahead and clean and lubricate all the major components underneath the saw [Music] so some components we're going to want to pay attention to here we've got the worm gears here attached to these orthogonal gears and these are the actual system that's used to raise and lower the blade and I clear out the dust but there's still a lot of residue in those and mine is starting to slow down and jam when I'm trying to raise the blade so those are something that you definitely want to be cleaning out and lubricating over here you're going to see this from the front angle as well but these are actually the cams that are there to set your ninety degree in 45 degrees stops we're going to be calibrating those pretty much in just a second here and you can see here we've got the trunnion this is what the blade is contained in and it pivots and the screws that you're gonna want to pay attention to are these these two Allen heads of course there's two on the other side but to actually to actually pivot this to make sure it's in line with your miter gauge you only need to loosen two and so we're gonna be taking care of that but I just wanted to point out these kind of couple important features that are gonna require some tuning so for lubricating there's lots of different routes you can go but you're probably gonna want to use some sort of a dry lubricant in most cases I know sge 4001 lubricant that a lot of people like to use I don't have any dry lubricant on hand right now and so I'm just going to be using some good old Johnson's paste wax which kind of is the solution for a lot of problems but this this repels dust pretty well so what I'm going to do is just use an old toothbrush to apply a bit and then I'm gonna go ahead and shift these a little and work that in and apply a bit more and you want to get in there and clean out all this gunk that's trapped between the teeth of these gears okay so we've got a lot of the important components kind of lubricated there next thing we're going to do is actually put the new blade on before we do any sort of calibration one thing you do want to check is that the nut and the arbor plate here are clean that your nuts doesn't have any sort of damaged threads or anything otherwise that's just gonna make things a pain later mine are clean and good to go so we're just going to reinstall this I'll just know what you do there's there's a beveled inside and an extruded side you want the extruded side facing out so facing away from the blade so just to show here guys I don't know if the camera is going to pick this up but essentially what we have is alternating teeth and so on one where you have a beveled will beveled tooth and then the next will be a flat ground and so that's going to allow us to get a good cutting action with rip cuts so we're not sacrificing that if we got it if you got an all flat ground blade you're going to sacrifice some of that strength with rip cuts so these beveled cuts are going to be great for that and then these flat ground teeth they're going to be great for cross cuts for getting any sort of flat bottom cuts we need for joinery so before we do any sort of calibration with the blade with respect to the miter slot first thing we want to do is check that the blade is exactly perpendicular 90 degrees to the table so what you want to do easiest way to do this you can do this with just a speed square but I do have this digital gauge here and so what we're going to do is you want to set this exactly on your table and we're going to zero this all right now we're just going to attach this to our blade and you can see we're at our 90 degree stop but we are actually at ninety point three so I'm gonna go ahead and adjust this cam so you see they look that little disc black disc there with these circles that is the cam stop and so right now it's saying we're at ninety degrees but clearly we're not so there's just this little Phillips head screw there and what we're gonna do is just loosen that and then break the lever gear and just put the blade over that pinch and as soon as this is exactly at 90 then we'll retighten the cam here and we'll be good to go well unfortunately for us this cam screw is completely rotted out and locked in place so we're gonna drill this out and try and reattach this cam with just a step size higher bolt and a nut and you'll have to manually adjust the cam with the note by loosening the bolt or the nut and then just rotating this cam but once you do it once it should be good to go for a long time so here goes nothing [Music] alright guys so we got these stops dialed in so you can see the blades at a random angle I'm gonna go ahead and set it to the 90 degrees stop you can hear it hit then we can see we are right at 90 perfect and now I'm going to move it up to the 45 degrees stop and lock it down and you can see we are one point a tenth of a degree off which is good enough for me so with those dowel in it's time to move on to the next step alright guys so we are on to the next step we are going to ensure that the blade is completely parallel with the miter slot and so the way you want to do this it's easiest to do this with a dial indicator like I have here you can do this with just a straight edge or a speed square but it's all much more accurate to do it this way and this dial gauge is only about 20 bucks so all I've done here is I put a threaded insert into this piece of MDF and I put this quarter inch 20 rod and then I use two nuts here to secure the dial gauge that allows me to move the dial gauge back and forth in and out if I need and then I'm just going to be clamping this on to the miter gauge and all we're gonna do is Mark a dot right below the tooth because the teeth are sometimes cut differently so right below the two three black dot with a sharpie we were then gonna slide this in and zero the gauge at that point we'll just rotate that black dot tooth to the backside and we'll bring this which is fixed in space and put it against the same exact black dot and if this indicator is moved from zero that means we're slightly you got a tilt from the miter slot and will then go in and adjust so here we go [Music] okay so you can see we are way off air so time to adjust the tilt of the blade you can see on the underside of the saw here is that these two allen wrench sockets and all we're gonna just do is loosen those two and then just slightly tap the trunnion in the direction that I need correction and then we're gonna go back up and recheck the scale so what I've done is just lightly loosen those you really don't need to loosen them that much now what I do is I have the gauge on that second tooth position and I'm just watching the gauge and I'm just gonna take a rubber mallet and real lightly tap on this alright until it's reading zero again now what I'm gonna do is just carefully start tightening that and then we're gonna go back and recheck the calibration and probably do it on a second tooth okay so after a bit of tweaking we finally have this thing dialed in so you can see you're on the second position and we are pretty much right on the zero point so now we'll just slide our gauge back and carefully rotate our reference tooth and line this up with the tooth and you can see we're pretty much right at zero still so oh this I mean this dial is probably not even even though they say it is it's probably barely accurate to the thousandth so getting this is pretty much good enough for me so we're gonna move on to the fence okay so the gauge is zero at least zero it enough for this first run now what we're gonna do is just run the gauge across the fence and we were just gonna carefully monitor our gauge and look at how much it's deviating from side to side so here we go we're at zero so at the other side here we were at the just below 40 which is terrible and so all you have to do is loosen these socket head screws that the fence is resting on and just slightly adjust them too and then we're just going to redo it and keep doing this until we deviate no more than about three or four thousandths of an inch across the length of the fence so this this terrible out of parallel is I'm sure what was causing lots of issues so here we go okay so that took quite a bit of adjusting and you have to come to it just accept that on a jobsite table saw like this you know you're not gonna get this in within two thousandth of an inch it's just not gonna happen I mean there's slop in the miter gauge the resolution of this is most likely not asked is it says they are if there's good chance this fence isn't perfectly flat and in fact I know it's not because the gauge starts to dip off at the end every single time so however if you watch the gauge we do have this to where it's pretty much only drifting within about three thousandths or so across the main length of the blade how the fence and for our purposes that's that's going to be good enough again on a on a real cabinet saw you're going to be able to get the seen even better but if you compare this to the 50,000th that this was off when we started this is a lot better so I'm not going to show this but basically what we're going to do because there's two positions for the fence as we're just going to double check that it's square on the second position and with that this project is gonna be done [Music] and I'm just gonna finish up with a bit of pace wax on the top everything is sliding freely yeah we your continent so again guys this project can be kind of intimidating to start I think it is for most people but if you just take the time to learn you know how to do this how to set your tool and how to set it up it really pays off to know how to take care of your tools and you're gonna get way better cuts with them and so that's it for the table-saw be sure to check out my other videos and subscribe and we'll see you guys in the next one [Music]

Channel: TheTranq

Views: 17,188

Rating: 4.915916 out of 5

Keywords: Tune Up, Woodworking, maintanance, diy, tablesaw, calibration, accurate, fence, blade, alignment, jobsite, saw, essential, skills

Id: gfjygyIv5x0

Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020