marc - welcome my friends to thefirst official shop talk. now this is kinda breaking from the format of what we usually dowith our project videos. it's going to be a short,quick, to the point answer to someone's email.
wood branding iron custom logo, cause i get a lot of questions via email, and it's nice to put it in a format that's useful for everybody, and can be found in the future
if you need that information. i'd also like to use it as an opportunity to tell you what's going on in the shop, if there's anything ineed to update you on community stuff like that. alright, so, let's get right into it. first things first, igot a couple stickers. a big thank you to everybody who sends these stickersin, these are awesome.
and vancemaker, by theway, dude's five years old. check him out. so, what's been going on in my life? well, two months ago, nicole gave birth two our second child,ava elizabeth spagnolo. she's doing great, she was born early just like her brother. and we did the whole nicu preemie thing, which is never really all that fun
but all we can ask for is a healthy baby, and that's what we have. so, she's doing great. mom's doing great and life is good. the other thing is, i just finished up my gaming dining table. now, that's a gild project and you can buy the plans if you want to. but i'm also gonna make a free video,
because i'm getting a lotof inquiries about it, people wanna see it go together and i can certainly doone of those fast videos. i hate doing teaser content,that's not my thing. but enough people have asked about it that i'm gonna try to do something that's a good compromise soyou can see it go together. cause it's kind of an awesome table. now, a big thank you goes out to my buddy
shaun rubino over at spunjinworks.com. he sent me this wonderful artpiece. this is a gilding and patination project, which you can kind of do on a flat panel and then incorporate into something else. and i think shaun is justgetting some practice here, doing his best david marks impression. this is fantastic work,it looks beautiful, shaun. and it will adorn the shop wall forever.
right now, let's check our mail bank. checkin' dah email. skip wrote in and asked, my 25 year old son and i did a couple of projects together, and now we're hooked. we want to start bypurchasing a table saw, we went to the local rockler store, and we're pretty set on buying a jet.
the guy that helped ussuggested a saw stop. i know you use powermatic. could i impose upon you for a suggestion? yes, skip. yes you may. now, he mentioned acouple different brands but let's talk about saw stop first. when it comes to saw stop, ifyou want that safety feature, boom, you're done.
save up, buy that saw. because there's no other saw on the market right now that has that safety feature. now if you're not sure you want it, or if you don't wanna paythe extra amount for it, you then open up the play book. there's a lot of differentbrands that you should consider. now, i recommended the pm 1,000. i think it's one of the bestsaws out there for the price.
it's got sort of that cabinetsaw style and feature set, but runs on 110, so the average shop will be able to handle thatkind of power requirement. there are other saws on the market, but that's one that i'm familiar with and that's what i recommended to skip. so, here's what he wrote back. i did listen to your advice and then did something different.
rockler was out of saw stops and they never stock powermatic. going with their cousin jet,we were able to get the saw, jointer and a thickness planer. since we're starting from nothing, we just need to get going. you know, i love that. andit's such a great point. because, skip had a big choice to make. do i spend, you know, thewhole last tool first?
which is good advice in some cases, but in this case, itmay have prevented him from getting some othertools that he needed to really get going andstarting to do his woodworking. so, i think in a lot of cases, you can easily justify goingwith less expensive tools, for the sake of getting a full shop. this way, you get somepractice under your belt. you learn more about what each tool does,
and maybe later on down the line, sell those tools andupgrade to something else when you understand whyit might be necessary to upgrade to something else. now let's head over to my table saw and i'll give you someadvice on what to look for and what things you can ignore if you're in the market for a new saw. what i've got here isa powermatic pm 2,000
with a custom paint job. years ago there was aservice that came along that would do this custom work to powermatic table saws. it was really cool,and somewhat shortlived because people couldn'tjustify the extra cost, but i was lucky enoughto get ahold of one. so, that's what i'm running here. it's got a five horsepower motor.
way overkill for what mostpeople need in the shop. i ordered it with a three,they accidentally sent a five and it was too much trouble to replace it. and so, i've got a five horsepower. basically, simple 10 inch cabinet saw. very reliable fence system, in fact i did upgradeto the very super cool tools fence system here. some aluminum extrusion, dead straight.
works really good for my purposes. up top, i'm running anafter market guard system. it's called the brett-guard from htc. i don't even know if they make it anymore. but you can see it's nice cause it kind of tilts out of theway when you don't need it, and it drops back down when you do. so, what do you lookfor in a good table saw? first you need a reasonably flat table.
now, it doesn't have to be dead flat. and it really only needs to be flat in the area around the blade. so don't stress out about it too much, but if it's way out of whack, you may want to skipon that particular one. you wanna make sure that the saw takes zero clearance inserts. either ones that you buy aftermarket,
or ones you make yourself. because the ones that come with the saws generally have too wide of a gap here. you really wanna close that up. zero clearance inserts are a must. you definitely wanna have somesort of splitter in place. now, a splitter is good, but a riving knife is better because it travels up and down
with the height of the blade so you can use it in more situations. and we don't have to have one of those big clunky guards around it. so you can use this with anoverhead guard of some sort. and you can remove it when you need to, and easily put it back in place for the safest cuts possible. you need a good, reliable fence.
something that when you lock it down, it doesn't move it's position and back here there's really no flex. and the fence itself shouldbe nice and straight. also take a look at the miter slot. this is more of a standard miter slot and if you buy anything aftermarket, chances are you're going to have no trouble findingaccessories that fit this.
there are some saws that have either proprietary, or sort of odd ball slots that make it difficult to make sleds, and things like that for your table saw. and one of the most usefulthings i have in the shop is a dado stack. so you want to make surethat the arbor is long enough to take a nice stack of blades like this. of course, this may varyin different countries.
now, those are the things that i feel are most important. but there are also some things that you can ignore. the first thing is the blade guard. not because you don't need one, but because there are so many great aftermarket solutions,that work better than the kinda crappy stuff that comes
with these tables saws, a lot of times. so, if it doesn't have agreat blade guard on it, that's ok. you can always add a better one later. don't stress out toomuch about the leaves. you could have stamped steel, or aluminum. something on the outside, because the primary working area, and the reference area of a table saw
if right here, around the blade. that needs to be good, flat cast iron. everything else can be, just supportive. it doesn't have to be in perfect line with the table saw top. so, that's a secondary concern. and finally, don't worry about the blade. most stocked blades are kinda crappy. so, you'll be upgrading that eventually.
and that alone willimprove the cut quality on your saw more than anything else. well, thanks for that question, skip. and i hope everyone elseenjoyed hearing my answer. remember, it's just my opinions. so if you feel differently about it, let me know in the comments. maybe you can help skip outwith a future tool purchase. and if you want to leave a question,
that might be read on the show, go to thewoodwhipserer.com/contact or just leave a question in the comment section twitter, facebook, whatever. i'm going to grab these questions from just about everywhere. alright, thanks for watching everybody.
and i'll catch you next time.
