This could also usefully be titled: “How to ‘test’ a Sawstop and blow $200 in an afternoon.”
I’ve had the saw fully operational for 2 or 3 months now and I love it. It’s very well built, runs smooth as silk, has plenty of power and better dust collection than my old saw (more on that later). The throat plate comes out very easily and blade changes are relatively painless.
It’s a little fiddly in that you need to remember to “turn on” the saw before you can use it. It has a main power switch next to the big paddle that operates the blade. This is for the electronics and you can’t do anything until it’s “booted up” and run through its self-tests and whatever else it does while you watch the blinking lights for 10-30 seconds (I haven’t really timed it). Also, you have to remember to “turn it off” before you leave the shop of the evening. Well, you don’t have to I suppose, the controller can’t use that much power. And, more than once I have forgotten to turn it off. I imagine that’s not uncommon.
A couple of weeks ago (I get behind on these things for time to time), I was working on the Early American blanket chest project and needed to miter some blocks for the feet. When you throw the blade over at 45 degrees, you need to move the miter gauge fence over to account for the blade. Believe me, my old fence has more than one cut through it from times I have forgotten.
I have a new, fancy Chinese miter gauge and aluminum fence that I like very much. It’s way more accurate than the ‘All American’ Incra V27 I had previously, though it spends 99.9% of it’s time at 90 degrees, it has dedents at every 1 degree and bigger ones at the popular angles.
So I set up for the cut and moved the fence over to accommodate the blade being tilted over to the left, fired up the saw and started the cut. Then, WHAM! The saw stopped. For a second I was completely at a loss for what happened and then realized the safety had fired on the saw. Moving the wood out of the way, I pulled the throat plate and sure enough, there was an aluminum block smashed into the saw blade. Son of a bitch. What caused that?
Well, careful examination of the wood and miter gauge revealed that I hadn’t moved it quite far enough to the left. Check out the picture, there’s the slightest nick on the very corner edge of the fence. If that had been a finger, it might not have even broken the skin. You see, the safety operates on conductivity. So cutting metal is right out until you turn the special key that disables the safety mechanism. Cool. Kind of. At least when I ordered the saw, I also ordered a spare cartridge. These are one shot affairs for obvious reasons. Impressively, the saw came with a spare as well, so I had two. That’s good because it’s not like you can jet out to orange box or blue box and pick one up.
I had the spare and not that minor worry of “does this thing really work?” has been laid to rest so I wasn’t even that upset. Now, hmm, how to remove this thing smashed into the saw blade (and the blade that may or may not be trashed as a result of the “test”? It took a fair bit of fiddling and a consultation of the thick wire bound instruction manual, but I got it out. Thoughtfully, they provide this little hatch on the right side of the cabinet that gives you access to the cartridge area. While that’s nice, I am glad I have this thing on 4″ wheels under a 2.75″ platform, otherwise, that would have been a feat of flexibility I can rarely manage.
As shown above, I eventually managed to extract the blade and cartridge and after much fussing, figured out how to install a new one.
Feeling proud for having a safe saw, having proven that it works, and having the foresight to assume I would fuck it up at least once accidentally and laid in a spare cartridge, I got back to work.
WHAM!
GDI! This time I was unable to maintain that veneer of equanimity. Yes, I did move the fence further to the left after the lesson learned. But, somehow, not quite enough. My best guess is that I raised the blade fully to replace the cartridge (and blade) and failed to lower it. My practice is to expose only as much blade as is required. A habit painfully learned with my old Grizzly saw. So…yeah, good thing I had a second cartridge. And more saw blades.
The good news is that having blazed the trail, it was a matter of minutes to get the new cartridge in and the blade installed. Then I took the wood over to the chop saw. To hell with accuracy.