Oh No, Not Another Sawstop Review, 13 years later

yes ladies and gentlemen i'm going to do a sas top review why the hell not [Music] yes yet another sawstop review soft top review with a little bit of a difference i've had mine for 13 years i believe the only ones available at the time were this big cabinet saw and one other a little bit of background so i started out with a contractor saw craftsman contractor saw that worked out very well i mounted it in a you know mobile base that i made out of plywood that worked out well for years then i then i got a jet um what they call a hybrid saw looks like a cabinet saw but it's not quite i had that for quite a few years as well and then one day late in the afternoon on a hot muggy hot muggy day when we didn't have any air conditioning in the shop i was doing some work on the table saw i was it was a stupid stupid mistake we all make them this is when the stupid mistakes are going to happen end of the day working all day tired hot and sweaty i clipped the tips of my two fingers in that uh jet cabinet saw in the blade didn't go to the bone just nipped off a little bit of the flesh fine okay it was an accident they happened i immediately wrapped up my fingers went and got the wife says we're going to the emergency room short story guy stitched me up did a wonderful job on the way back one of the things my wife said was you're getting a saw stop who am i to argue you're getting a saw stop okay well it just so happened i was moving from one company to another and i sold a bunch of leave back to my old company and i got a big chunk of change with that money i bought this saw i ordered it from a local dealer frisbee and sharp link in the link in the description um it was very costly i opted for the three horsepower 220 volt saw which probably i'll never ever run something through this that needs that kind of horsepower but while i was at it why not the cool thing about freespill and sharp is the the company owner came to my door with a truck and a lift gate with nothing else in his truck on a saturday dropped it on the floor and put it right in the middle shop where i wanted it with his little wheelie thing right where i wanted it and off he went and there was my saw in boxes so no unboxing video i didn't have a camera back then so i unboxed the saw and started assembling it one of the things i found was that as others have reported that this saw comes out of the box just about ready to go perfect i i've actually made no adjustments except for the fence the right wing fit perfectly i mean it's just absolutely there's no no warper bow in it it was wonderful the left wing as most of you know is a plywood melamine coated piece of material that goes on there for the left wing more on that later one flaw i found in the saw when i unpacked it started assembling it this bar for the beesmeyer style fence had a warp in it so i called sawstop and say hey it's got a warp in it and they said oh what's your what's your name okay we'll send you a new one great you want the no no just throw the old one away we'll send you a new one it's coming about three days four five days later it came dead straight i finished assembling the saw the blade was perfectly aligned to the uh the slots the fence was off by me maybe 5 or 10 degrees and i made one adjustment there and i adjusted the tension on the locking handle ready to go it's on a mobile base which i almost never use ready to go you've heard descriptions of by many youtubers about this the system that stops the saw there's a few myths out there too let me show you what i keep in my shop just kind of as a reminder this was the i think the second time it went off and in 13 years it's gone off maybe eight or nine times and only once has it gone off with my finger touching the blade accidentally everything has been oh a piece of metal in the wood or i touched it with a piece of metal when it was when it was spinning um there's no there's no explosive charge in this there's a fusible link that holds the shoe down against the uh i guess this part of the the cartridge there's a very stiff spring i mean this is almost like a stiffer than a valve spring in a car what happens is when this when this gets triggered the fusible link goes off melts the link and this thing gets sprung up into the blade as you can see the metal shoe which aluminum jams into the blade the inertia of that action clicks the trunnion off its draw off its catch and the whole thing drops below the blade that's how that works as most know it has a bypass feature if you want to cut metal or wet wood i'm not going to turn the saw on now because of the noise but you flip the saw on you rotate the key it blinks between the red and the green red and the green then it comes to solid green release the key the bypass is now set so you can cut in wet wood or metal if you turn the saw off the bypass is set back to the normal mode and the cartridge is activated if you want to cut more stuff you have to reset the bypass every time you want to cut wet wood or aluminum that way the bypass never ever gets left on once you turn the saw off the bypass is turned off the manual is a work of art in its own this is probably the best manual tool manual i've ever had spiral bound it's on card stock as one other youtuber pointed out it's it's very detailed it is very descriptive and it is easy to understand and follow for anybody um go through all the steps you need to adjust in a line if you have to it uh describes how the system works and it shows you actually a diagram of the trunnion carrier and how that drops down when the saw the saw goes off i mean and as just people have no have noted this thing stops the blade and drops below the table in about under 10 milliseconds if you look at the the youtube's high speed videos from sawstop and others you'll see what i mean i mean it touches your finger and it's out it's gone it's literally gone i've made two modifications to the saw one in this router table it's all just some parts there's a link in the description to a video of me building and installing this router table number two is that half inch uh mesh cloth wire cloth that i've placed over the dust port does collection port so when the nut falls out of my hand while i'm changing blades it doesn't go down into the tube and i have to dig it out of the back of the saw here's one other little modification i did it's basically just the insert plates check cartridge shoe gap there's a story behind that i just did this in my cnc machine and put some white paint over it so that i don't forget to check that gap because if you don't if you've got to check that gap you may have a problem and that problem is if the shoe is too close to your saw blade or your dado head it could go off spontaneously you got to get that measurement just correct and the measurement is like 3 30 seconds or so and it's about the width of a nickel so i have a nickel here i use all the time for for for setting the gap between the blades and the cartridge now i did have a go off with a dado head it was too close to the to the to the saw to the dado head blade and um it didn't drive itself into the dado head because wide area i guess it absorbed a lot of the energy there so the cartridge was toast but the dado head came out fine so i've had to replace the cart dado cartridge one piece of advice this is i know this is the dado cartridge have a spare cartridge in your shop i don't have a spare dado cartridge but i have a spare regular cartridge for the saw in my shop in a drawer over there so if it does go off i can get back to work really quickly now my wife and i have an agreement whoever sets it off buys the new cartridge i bought a few she's bought two it also went off once and that was the only time my finger touched the blade when i turned the saw off and it was winding down now as long as that blade is turning the system's activated and so i touched it when it was slowing down it was pretty slowed down pretty pretty far didn't even nick me and it went off but because the blade wasn't turning very fast there was not a lot of inertia the motor wasn't turning on under power there wasn't a lot of inertia so it just banged into the blade set the cartridge off when i took it apart i found that the blade was fine because it was winding down wasn't a lot of energy and but i never plan to replace the cartridge so there we are with the cartridges i have bought and added stuff to it over time build things for it the first thing i built was this outfeed table and a cross cut sled i used the william ing method of five cuts to an accurate crosscut sled came out really nice and of course an auxiliary or sacrificial fence where i can run rabbits you see the cutout already from the dado munching out the bottom of that thing it has a trough on down running down the center of it where i can store gear and stuff like that and it locks on the fence with two nylon set screws doesn't move i also replaced the miter gauge that came with the saw with a craig miter gauge i love this thing it's great everybody replaces the miter gauge that comes with their saw just about stuck a couple of rare earth magnets down on top of the fence so i've got the the height adjustment wrench for the cartridge here and this is an adjustment wrench for something on the on the the router table as to the performance of the saw as i said earlier i've used other moderate to high-end saws and this by far beats them all take out the safety feature put it away don't have it and this is one of the best saws i've ever used in my life probably the best saw i'm not saying that just because i own the damn thing and it gets used a lot i mean i when i was working for a living every weekend i was here doing something and now since i'm retired i've i'm in here at least two or three times a week and on the weekends doing some kind of a project i think this is the only saw i've ever used that had two wrenches one for the inside of the arbor and one for the arbor nut i mean this makes working getting blades on and off just super super easy you don't have to stick a block of wood in to tighten up your nut when you're putting a saw blade or a dado head in there on the subject of dado heads so i have the freud dila dado dado head for dado stack for doing dados on the machine datas and rabbits i have a video on how this thing works and how wonderful it is now this is deeper than any normal stack dado system it's got more depth this way so the arbor on this saw is fine for a normal dado stack if i stack this up to three quarters of an inch um the nut goes on about halfway that's fine engineering principle three threads or more got through more three or more threads and i can tighten it down it's not coming off but it's it has it could be concerning to some people but i rarely ever use a full three quarters i'm usually doing a rabbit or a smaller dado or doing some uh some some tenons which i'm going to be running through the saw going from one side to the other but i rarely have to put this up to a full three quarters um that's just informational that's the dial of data look at the video that'll be in the description as well the three horsepower motor it doesn't see the wood going through it using a thin kerf blade of course it's the only thing you can use on these because the riving knife is made for a thin kerf blade i put hard maple through it white oak red oak all kinds of hardwoods and the blade doesn't even know the wood is there just right through it accurate unbelievably accurate 13 years it's never given me a lick of problems it's always worked every time i wanted it to it's functioned perfectly all that time is it remains aligned without issue i set it off a few times it's going to happen most like i said only one time with the finger and it was winding down when i did that i really love this saw i will never own another saw other than a saw stop and this one should last me the rest of my life now this is the equivalent i think of today's industrial cabinet saw the the motor swing box is over on this side of the saw whereas the their their professional cabinet saw has the motor swing box on this side so it swings this way i think that's all i need to say about it i mean i know there's been controversy about these saws over the years and that's fine debate is good but safety is uh equally important and this is one tool in the shop that i know is going to work and not hurt me i mean i've actually had some accidents with power tools in the past especially in the boat shop um they were pretty nasty i healed from them but this is one tool i know is going to protect myself and my wife this is the tool she had to get past in order to come in and do a lot of woodworking once she got past this using this she was gang gangbusters learned all the tools so there we go yet another sawstop review quick and dirty i love the thing um it's gonna go with me wherever we live and um i hope you enjoyed this hit the hit the like button subscribe button and look for notifications the notification button and make good things out of wood

Channel: Kevin Riley

Views: 1,459

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Sawstop, sawstop review, using a sawstop, sawstop tips and tricks

Id: be3I8aRKDWw

Length: 15min 16sec (916 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 17 2020