Tested: SawStop Jobsite Table Saw

hi this is Dave Frank from tools of the trade today I'm going to show you the features of saw stops new job site table saw this saw has been a long time coming saw stop is made cabinets AWS and contractor saws for a good 10 years this saw just came out in March of 2015 one of the more interesting features on this saw is the crank for raising and lower the blade one turn gets you all the way up and all the way down usually with Sasha to crank that thing a million times the bevel is set by squeezing the back of the handle that's your release wherever you let go it locks in place if you want to do more fine adjustment there's a mechanism here that will give you plus or minus you can rotate it it will give you plus or minus a degree so you can dial in about whatever you want the fence stores on the side of the saw it it's kind of unusual in the sense that it this is the mechanism for locking it's this button it connects on the front connects on the front part of the fence only it just rides on the back lots very firmly in place I mean it's kind of almost a t-square type fence I've heard people speculate that oh it doesn't lock him back that's bad I've never had it flex or do anything like that when I've been cutting pretty heavily on it so I don't think it's a problem a nice part about this is it slides very easily because you're not trying to grab back here also let's make some cuts with this thing okay I'm going to make a test cut with the saw so you can see how it works this is a piece of five quarter-inch hard maple that's a pretty tough thing to cut I'm using the supplied 40 tooth blade I'm also going to use the supplied push stick which stores over here the saw has an electronic safety Nick and the mechanism that controls everything so when you start the saw the first thing going to do is power it up and the first time you powered up you know after it's been off for a while it takes a few seconds to kind of do its own diagnostics this is the power switch when I flip it on you'll see this red light flashing well it checks itself out once that red light goes off and the green light is on solid the saw is ready to run and to turn the saw on I've got the powered up Green says it's ready to go I can flip this on and the saw will come on I have this saw connected to a dust collecting vac it's a self-cleaning VAX oh you'll hear it running in the background if you hear some thumping that's not the saw it's the vacuum cleaning itself here goes you'll notice this flashing green has flashes green when the saw is kind of spinning down okay so I've cut the board the vacuum is powered down I haven't done anything else the power of the saw if you look you'll see that it's still green because I haven't turned this power switch off I could turn this back on on the saw would come right back on the saw it doesn't have to go through diagnostics it has to go through them once when you first start up and then it's fine as long as the thing is always powered up I'm going to take the fence off so that you can see what's inside the saw this goes down here the throat plate comes out there's a little spring-loaded tab you pull this it pops out the spring-loaded tab keeps this from falling out while you're transporting the saw I can take the riving knife out by flipping a little lever here knife comes out it stores with a bunch of spare parts in this box over here this is where the guard stores this is where spare cartridge stores there's a miter gauge there's the guard this is a spare cartridge we don't need to put this in there because the cartridge that's in there is fine there's some wrenches here for adjusting things on the machine when the blade break on the saw stop is activated it destroys the $69.00 cartridge and damages are destroyed whatever blades you have in there most people if they if that's what happened instead of losing a finger or a hand or having to go to the emergency room would think that was a pretty good deal what people are concerned about is our false activations where the mechanism goes off because you're cutting something that has a nail in it a staple in it or you're cutting wood that's too wet this is a piece of very wet pressure treated lumber it may not look like that to those of you who are on the East Coast or used to seeing it green out here on the West they typically stain this stuff and that's the way you buy it I bought this a couple days ago it's very wet I'm going to cut it first in bypass mode bypass mode temporarily deactivates the safety mechanism and allows you to cut materials that are too conductive without having the blade break off the way you do that is is you hold in this bypass button the red light down here will flash then you flip the lever to turn the motor on for that red light to flash again and then you can let go of this button and the motor will stay on as soon as you turn this up turn the motor off it will go back to the normal mode and if you want to go back to bypass you'll have to go through this operation again while you're running in bypass that green light is going to flash when I'm done if the wood I've cut was not too conductive the the red light will remain off but if it was too conductive the red light will come flashing and tell me hey that stuff too wet here goes as you can see this is telling me that woods very wet I'm going to rip this piece of wet pressure-treated lumber again one of two things could happen the blade break had fire and that would destroy the cartridge and damage or destroy the blade or the electronic sensors in here will detect that this is very wet wood and put a wet wet wood overload which will cause the red light to flash and will slow the motor down or even stop it telling me hey this is way too wet to cut with the safety mechanism on if you want to cut this stuff you're going to have to go into the override mode that's actually kind of a neat feature because it means you don't necessarily destroy the cartridge and blade if you accidentally cut lumber that's too wet okay all right I'm going to try it here's what just happened I was cutting wet pressure-treated lumber without setting the sod of the bypass mode and wet wood can interfere with the saws ability to detect flesh so the electronics load and then stop the motor this is all the farther right this is all the further I got with a cut not very far the alternative for the saw would have been to trip the brake which would have meant I'd had destroyed a cartridge and probably had to replace the blade this function is called the wet wood overload and I think the reason it exists is to prevent people from using the saw and thinking they're protected when maybe they're not which is well that was exciting as you can exceed the blade went below the table the cartridge is destroyed I don't know what shaped the blades in that was a fail on my part the flashing light told me this was too wet I cut it anyway thinking maybe I would activate the the wet wood overload instead I activated the break so now I'm going to have to change that out before I can do any more cutting people who are considering buying a saw stop are often concerned about what might happen if they hit a staple or nail staples and nails or metal metals conductive and conductive materials can set the break off which will destroy the cartridge and maybe the blade I'm going to test that proposition I've put a staple into the end of this piece of framing lumber I also put a row of staples along the edge and I put some nails sixpenny nails into the side I didn't choose those for any particular reason there just happened to be handy I'm going to run this through the saw and see what happens see whether it'll cut or whether it will set off the safety mechanism as you can see I've got the guard on there I should have been using the guard all along I didn't because I thought it would be easier for people to see the saw and what happens of during various cutting things without the guard on there have it on there now because I'd rather not have a piece of nail come flying out and hit me in the face I'm also going to wear a face shield just in case well we made it through without setting off the brake as you can see here I cut through some of the staples a few of the staples flew off cut through all of the sixpenny nails that wasn't the best thing to do to the blade but it was better than jamming the cartridge into it the you know that bleh maybe okay I may have nicked some teeth but it's still usable what demonstration of a saw stop would be complete without the hot dog test I'm going to perform it with sausages I have two sausages because I'm going to perform the test twice the first time I'm going to have the saw set to bypass mode and you'll see what happens when flesh needs blade and the safety system is disabled or in the case of folks who don't have saw stops what happens when flesh meets blade and you don't have a safety system the second test I'm going to perform with the in the normal mode and we'll see what the saw does when it hits the sausage I'm going to put this lucky lucky sausage off to the side it gets using the second test normally when people do these tests they've got like a miter gauge and they run the saw the hotdog into the saw at 90 degrees it seems kind of fake to me I know why they do it it's easier and safer to do at a trade show I'm going to run this through here as if I'm ripping this effect I'll set it so it actually cuts and this is hanging out there a little too far like somebody who was not careful about where they put their thumb I'm going to do this and by I'm going to do this in bypass mode so that you'll see what happens not pretty that would be what happened if you weren't careful and you were in bypass motor you're the saw that didn't have a safety system the next hot the next sausage is going to be a little bit luckier than this one I think so I'm going to run this one now I'm going to be in the normal mode you can see it's going green I'm not going to go into bypass and we're going to do this again with the with the more fortunate sausage I think the blade hit the sausage somewhere around here I'm looking real hard and I cannot see a nick or a scratch if this had been a person's finger that person would have really gotten a very good scare but they wouldn't have been hurt at all they wouldn't even have to wear a band-aid I tripped the brake by trying to cut a sausage and what happens when the brake is stripped is it jams itself in the bottom of the blade to stop it from spinning and the entire arbor assembly swings below the table I can't use the saw again until after I replace the cartridge and blade and reset the arbor assembly I've unplugged the saw taking off the fence and I'll show you how to replace the blade in cartridge first you take off the throat plate I'm gonna pull out the riving knife and then the procedure the saw the blade is dropped below the table and I can't get it up until I reset the whole Arbor assembly the procedure for doing that is to crank the blade all the way down and then all the way back up and this will reset it now it's up in an elevation which is actually easier to get it the thing out to to remove it so next I'm going to remove the bleeding cartridge the wrenches store here on back one of these cartridges look at one of these um wrenches has got sort of a spatula prying end on it that will help me get the blade and cartridge off of here this is frozen pretty good the cartridge is held on by a pin and I'm going to pull that out I'm just going to jiggle it till it comes free there's the pin and now I've got to get this off of there so I'm going to give it a pry and a probably sort of both the cartridge and the blade because they're sort of they're stuck to each other and I'll show you that in a minute and if you look closely you can see that the teeth of the blade are just buried right there in the cartridge and these are stuck together I could get these apart and probably what would happen is I'd lose two or three tips if this was a valuable blade and the plate wasn't bent I could take it to a sharpening place have them braised on a few new tips and and resharpen the rest of the blade and I could use it again this is probably not that expensive a blade I'll probably just throw it out I'm going to replace the cartridge next the spare cartridge lives in this box over here you can slide the end of the table out to get at it it's always good to keep a spare otherwise if you set the thing off you can't even and you've got a new blade you're still sort of stuck let me show you what this thing looks like it's kind of interesting as you can see there's like a multi-pin connector right here looks a lot like something you'd see on the back of a computer there's a very stiff spring under here and there's a circuit board in here when the saw senses that flesh touches the spinning blade it sends an electrical signal to the circuit board here which cut which releases this spring and allows this piece of metal to swing up into the bottom of the spinning blade and it stops it almost immediately the momentum of that action drops the entire arbor assembly below the table okay so I've got a replacement cartridge let me show you how that goes in it goes on basically there post inside the saw one fits through here one fits through here and then I put a pin through here on the other side it's a fairly easy procedure so when I slide it on the electrical connection is made I've got this pin I just put the pin through that third hole and then twist it so now the cartridge is in there and really at this point in time all I've got to do is put a blade on it's the same as putting a blade on any other saw I'd like to show you the two types of cartridges that work with this saw this is the standard cartridge it works with ten inch diameter blades only the aluminum part on top is about three quarters of an inch wide I tried using this with an 8 inch stacking dado to see if it would work the saw must have some sort of proximity sensor because it wouldn't even turn on if I want to use a data set it'll there's a cartridge that works with an 8-inch stacking only it looks like this it's you know from the side it's identical to the standard cartridge which different is the aluminum piece on top is wider so if you're going to use the stacking dado you're going to want probably two of these one to keep in the saw and a spare just in case saw stops job site saw is a nice table saw it would be a nice table saw even if it didn't have the safety mechanism it's got a very nice fence with a very unique lever type latch slides very easily locks very easily I like the mechanism for raising and lowering the blade because you can put it all the way up or down with a single rotation I like the mechanism for setting bevel because you can operate it one-handed and there's a fine adjustment isn't attached to it that allows you to go up or minus one degree in really tiny increments everything stores very well in the saw it's solidly made and it works the way a table so I was supposed to work it I didn't talk much about the stand it's got a nice stand folds up easily rolls very well I think you'd want the stand this is a you know this is a heavier than average table saw and it's much easier to wheel it around I wouldn't want to have to carry it the saw carries a rather hefty pricetag I think it currently goes for about 1,300 bucks I'm probably not the best person to ask as to whether it's worth 1,300 bucks because I have all ten of these the person to ask would be somebody who's lost a finger if you know anybody's lost a finger ask them what they'd be willing to pay to get it back I bet you all of them would tell you that they'd be willing to pay thirteen hundred bucks and I bet you most of them if they had it I'd be willing to pay thirteen thousand you

Channel: The TOOLS Show

Views: 84,128

Rating: 4.8450704 out of 5

Keywords: Table Saw, SawStop (Business Operation), portable table saw, jobsite table saw

Id: ZWGgz6IDvKk

Length: 19min 6sec (1146 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 15 2015