Sawstop, With Everything Please - Which Table Saw is Best - Tool Reviews

hey this is ken with black dell studio and this week i did what i never thought i would do i replaced my three horsepower sawstop pcs with something even better stay tuned to see what i got i had originally planned on this being a big grand reveal where i would surprise everybody with the new saw that i got but depending on how observant you are there are definitely some spoilers out there if you look closely but i was able to pick the saw up locally they were gonna deliver it but they're only like 10 minutes from my house and that was going to take an extra like three days so i just went and picked it up because i have this new powered stacker that is pretty slick and able to offload things in my shop just by myself i did eventually get the rare shop helper here and it's really nice to have an extra set of hands i kind of take for granted what it's like to have a helper around so he was able to help me get some of the unboxing and get this saw set up in its final resting place and this is what i got i replaced my saw stop with a saw stop and this might be anticlimactic for some of you but this is not apples to apples i replaced my pcs my professional cabinet saw with an ics the industrial cabinet saw i'll take you through some of the specific advantages of the ics versus the pcs as we go through the setup but as a whole think of it this way whatever your hobby is whether it's landscaping or cooking there are tools designed to be used by the consumer and tools designed to be used commercially and that's exactly what this is this is their commercial grade saw i do owe a big thank you to the people at sawstop for providing me with this saw at no cost which was pretty incredible to get that level of support from a company like sawstop i still think of myself as just a small little woodworking page but it is pretty incredible to get that level of support from a company like sawstop who if you don't know is actually based like 10 minutes from my house in the greater portland area they have basically become the industry standard in table saws over the last 15 years or so since they've been out but one thing that i feel like they've been kind of not known as well for is their commercial grade saws and even though this ics has been out for a while one thing they didn't have was a big commercial grade slider and that is what i got here and a quick call to action for all tool manufacturers copy what sawstop does this was the most straightforward instructions i've ever seen it was really cool because they don't just give you a big sack of bolts and say yeah put this m8 bolt in this m8 nut and it'll be fine what they do is they give every single piece is labeled and numbered specifically so you can see there you have an a a b and a double n and all you do go over to your handy little sheets here and you find the corresponding letters and it was really cool because i can't tell you how frustrating it is when you just have a big sack of bolts and you're like i don't know what size this is is this the right one so you just pop those out install them and it is as straightforward as that if you get the slider and or this ics don't be discouraged if it doesn't seem this easy to you because it really wasn't that easy it was probably a day to set up the saw another day to set up the slider and then probably half a day to fine tune the slider and here's one mistake that i made and the mistake was overestimating the size of my shop i was going to leave that left wing installed and decided to take that left cast iron wing off and if you're gonna do that you have to cut up your rails and this is right in the manual sawstop tells you exactly how to do it it looks kind of crazy to cut up these brand new perfectly powder coated rails but it is required and it really wasn't too bad you can still put the end caps right back in and it looks like it was factory installed the saw stop manual goes through all the different configurations you can choose for your slider i opted to have the fence mounted on the rear which limits you to like 49 inches of cross cut you can get up to like 70 inches if you put the slider on the front i just felt like i had a little bit more control i might change it someday to the front but for now i opted for it on the rear one of the things i've always loved about sawstop is how basically everything is adjustable and i love that they make it that way because some tool manufacturers say hey we make it perfect it'll never break you don't need to adjust it and the fact of the matter is you will always need to adjust it someday things get bumped things get smacked you know having a saw like this for 10 20 30 years yes someday it's gonna need to be adjusted so i was able to adjust how parallel was to the blade there and here you can even see you can adjust how parallel the fence is to the table so it's just a tiny little adjustment and it even comes with this allen wrench sawstop explains how to do all this so just a real treat to be able to really dial it in and tune it up just perfect this slider was a lot of work to get dialed in just perfectly and one tool that i utilize that i highly recommend you do the same if you're having any issues with any soft stop whether it's the saw or the slider is the sasop technical support phone line because when you call you just get a normal person on the phone that's here local not somebody overseas looking at a manual you get a local person that's actually looking at a saw they will walk over to a saw find the exact piece that you're working on and work through the troubleshooting with you live on the phone so that was super helpful for me as some of you probably know i've been frantically trying to set my shop up as fast as i can over the last couple of months and one of the downsides to that is i had been operating with no dust collection for quite a while and you'll see here it is messy work when you're working with a table saw and no dust collection especially cutting mdf but take a mental note of how much dust comes out the top because i have a new dust collection solution that you'll see is a lot better also here's my new miter station and i'm gonna have a video on this i'm actually really proud of that whole miter setup it's really simple really flat everything's adjustable and a lot more info on that miter station to come i had wanted this floating dust collection guard for quite a while but it's not compatible with the router table on the far right wing which is how my pcs was set up so when i was setting this one up i decided to keep my router table but i'm going to relocate it to my outfeed table and opt for the dust collection instead i was shocked at how heavy duty this overarm piece was here and it only took me about two days of using this to realize why they made it so heavy and that is because i dropped about a ten foot two by eight on it and it didn't really even blink so kudos to sauce up for making something strong enough to withstand working in my shop if you have any really technical questions on setting up your saw or dialing it in i really recommend you call that technical support line because they're going to know a lot more than me however if you have any personal questions on buying a saw if you are wondering if a 1.75 horse is going to be enough for you or if you should get a pcs versus a ics hit me up because i will give you a really candid answer and even though this is a sponsored video sawstop wants you to get the best saw for you they don't want you to be unhappy with the saw you get so i won't just tell you to get the most expensive saw i'll tell you the saw that i think will be the best fit so leave me a comment asking any questions you have about this saw or a saw you're considering getting if you look at my past videos you'll realize that i am really good about reading and answering essentially every single comment the only thing i ask is if you get something from that comment you just hit that subscribe button and if you want to be really helpful you'll hit that little bell notification button next to it i genuinely try to give as much information away for free here on youtube and on my blog however there are always those problems that come up that are more complicated than can be answered in a quick youtube comment or blog comment so because of that i started offering video consultations through my website where i will meet with you via video chat and we can discuss whatever it is you're having issues with maybe you are about to do your first epoxy pour or you need some social media strategies whatever it is you want to talk about i am happy to chat about in those video consultations whether you are dialing in your sliding table or building a crosscut sled the absolute industry standard for doing this is the william ing five cut method and there are lots of youtubers out there that have copied his idea and made their own videos they are never as good as the original i just watched kids the other day it's like 36 minutes long has like 2.1 million views so you know if you get 2.1 million views on a 36 minute video of dry material it's got to be pretty valuable so i will include a link to that in the video description because i know i would not be able to do it just as he does an outstanding job of explaining every step of the process a lot of you out there are probably wondering would you have paid money for the saw if sawstop didn't offer to give it to you for free and that's a really good question and it's also a really hard one because first of all it's easy for me to say oh absolutely i would have done it because i already got this off for free and then it's easy for you guys to say oh i don't believe him but i had actually already discussed this with a wife we'd kind of already earmarked the money for the saw because it's expensive it's like five thousand dollars plus another 1500 for the slider and this is something that i wanted to build just once when it comes to building the outfeed table and making the space just perfect for this saw and one major upgrade you can see there is the power and i never really felt like that three horsepower was letting me down if you had a good clean sharp blade on it but this five horsepower is a significant upgrade you can see here i'm cutting some four inch thick walnut on that slider and this is not something i can do on my miter saw can't get all the way through it unfortunately but flipped it over and you can see just a tiny bit of burning on that first cut there so the power was a huge upgrade and just the overall build quality i've never really complained about the build quality of a sawstop before but this is significantly better than my pcs a lot of you out there are probably wondering if you should either a upgrade your pcs to an ics or if you're going to buy your first saw stop just buy an ics the first time and that's a good question i would say if you use your table saw three or more days a week meaning you're kind of that next step up from the weekend warrior i would strongly strongly consider getting an ics if you are more of a weekend warrior i think you would be totally fine with the pcs probably for the rest of your life there are a bunch of different configurations you can mount that fence and i opted for the rear mounting of the fence which limits you to about 49 inches for a cross cut and if you mount it on front you can actually get like i think it's about 70 inches i felt like i had a little bit more control mounting at the back but i wanted to show you guys these cool little pins that they have there they make it so easy for you wonder how are you get your fence perfectly perpendicular to the blade every time since you have to take that fence on and off all the time and here is how it has that little set pin in there that when you put it back on it clicks exactly into where it was before so what i've been doing through all these cuts is just kind of beating this up i took this last big chunk that's i think about two and a half inches thick and i ran this one through and i've just been doing a bunch of random big slab cuts that's what i've been doing through most of this video here at least this last little bit of the video and i wanted to see after i did all these cuts whether that fence could go back to being perfectly square and i'll show you that test cut here in just a minute while i'm not going to teach you the william ing 5 cup method for squaring up your slider or crosscut sled i will offer a little bit of advice and that is to use either mdf or melamine i started to use plywood when i first did the cuts and it was a little bit hard to get an accurate reading so when i took my four cuts here to see how square my fence stayed i used an old melamine sheet that i had left over from an epoxy table and you'll see here it was 48 and a 16th and the other side was exactly 48 and a 16th as well and if you're wondering why is it 48-16 i do have one complaint for sawstop is the little flip stop they give you you just kind of have to eyeball where it lands i wish they had a little hair indicator like they do on their table saw fence i think that would be really slick and make it a lot easier this was again 30 and 16 and 13 to 16. so the important thing is it was perfectly square but i would like a little bit better indicator on their flip stop i wanted to give a pretty thorough rundown of this floating dust guard too because there really isn't much information out there when you look it up so first off i wanted to show you what it's like without it and i still have the dust collection on i have my five horsepower oneida hooked up but just to the one port down below and you can see just how much gets airborne there and i wish i could come up with a little bit better backdrop so you could really see how much of this melamine blasts up into your face and it's not just what settles on the cast iron there there's so much of it airborne and you can start to see it as it comes through there it really puts a ton of this stuff into the air so i made just a bunch of cuts without the dust guard and then i'll show you what it's like with the dust card the first thing i'll show you is not very realistic in terms of how you use it every day but i just grabbed a pile of the dust off the ground and i want to show you how much suction actually comes down to the table when the guard is lowered so yeah there's a fair amount of suction that goes down to the table and again that doesn't really matter what really matters how much of this dust actually gets taken out of the air so here is the first cut and you probably didn't see any come up in the air because it gets just blasted right back into that guard and there is just a few specks on the table so on a traditional cut this overarm dust guard is amazing i did a whole bunch of these cuts and you'll see some cuts here a little bit are not quite as effective but for everyday use it got i would say better than 90 of the dust i've found that the worst cuts as far as dust collection are the ones where like half the blade is touching the material and half the blade isn't and kind of these half kerf cuts that can be the most frustrating one kicking back a lot of materials so i intentionally did a few of those with the melamine and you definitely do get some dust kick back so if you want zero dust this is not gonna be the solution and if you have a solution out there let me know what it is because i would love to see it this is an excellent solution but it's going to leave a few specks of dust on the ground so overall i am thrilled with how it works but no it is not going to get every single speck of dust especially when it's raised up a little bit higher on those thicker pieces of wood that are only doing the half kerf cut so it is not a zero dust solution but i would say it is better than 90 of the dust that i produced in all my cuts some of you are probably thinking this floating dust card seems pretty cool but it is really in the way i can't use my jigs you can't do any of those taller vertical cuts sawstop has you covered there because just that one knob releases it swings out of the way super easy there's not a bunch of adjustments or anything you have to do we can swing it back into place with just one arm and then click that little knob right back into its spot that is it if you are still not sure if you are ready to upgrade your pcs to the ics this is directly from sawstop the main differences of the pcs and the ics and on top of the added weight stability build quality there is a lockout tag out switch so if you have teenagers or neighbors that are going to use your saw you can lock that out and prevent that from happening i like the bigger table longer table longer fence everything is basically commercial grade all right i think this week the holiday cheer finally hit me so this week start your question or comment with your favorite holiday and it cannot be boxing day unless you give a thorough explanation of what boxing day actually is because i have no idea anyway start your question or comment with your favorite holiday and i will know you watch the entire video and i promise i will answer all of your questions or comments first thank you so much again and please subscribe for more videos just like this one

Channel: Blacktail Studio

Views: 255,566

Rating: 4.6389599 out of 5

Keywords: Table saw review, is sawstop worth it, sawstop, table saw, sawstop large sliding table, table saw dust collection, sawstop floating dust colleciton, sawstop floating overarm dust collection, sawstop review, powermatic table saw, best cabinet saw, tool reviews, sawstop router table, table saw reviews, best table saw 2020, best table saw 2019, tablesaw, dream woodshop, ultimate woodshop, makerspace, ultimate workshop, dream workshop, sawstop ics

Id: BQ-gB5tdmNo

Length: 15min 26sec (926 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 10 2020