Marc: The next adjustment that we can make
is the blade bevel angle.
Right now, it's set at 90 degrees.
I have it all the way up as high as it can go,
and I can double check it.
The way I do this is using a machine is square,
or you can use an adjustable square,
as long you have a really decent quality one
that you know is 90 degrees.
I site down from the front.
What I'm looking for is the little tiny strip
of light that peaks through.
When that square is perfectly even with the blade,
the light goes away.
Honestly, that's really all it takes;
no fuel or gauges.
Don't get real fancy with it.
Just wait for that light to disappear
and you're exactly 90 at that point.
Most saws have a stop that's inside the cabinet
that basically stops that whole unit from going any further.
It locks you down at a preset position for 90 degrees.
You also have one at 45 because those are
the two most common angles that we're going to use.
That way you can just kind of blindly
turn it all the way until it stops.
Now we're 45, bring it all the back until you're at 90.
The problem that I have with that is a lot of times,
dust, debris, oil, residue, whatever,
gets stuck on either the unit that's moving
or the stop pin that's in there.
Although I do adjust it now and make sure that
it's exactly 90 degrees, the other one is exactly 45,
I know that over time, that's not going to give me
exactly the accurate number that it once did.
Every time I change my blade and bring it back
to the home position at 90 degrees,
I will always check it with a square
to make sure it's dead on.
Same thing goes for 45.
I never assume that it truly is 45.
I use anything that I have that's at a 45 degree angle
and use that to check it
and make sure it's exactly the angle that I want.
I don't really stress out about setting those
two things up dead on accurately because I'm never
going to count on them in the first place.
Now let's take a look at the insert.
See, as you push wood over the table saw,
you'll want to make sure,
the most important thing really,
is right in the beginning and right at the end.
You don't want to get caught in the insert.
At the end, you don't want to get caught on the table.
Most inserts have little hex screws.
You can use a little Allen wrench to make the adjustments
and raise and lower it.
What I like to do is span a straight edge across.
Hear that?
That means that there's some play in there.
You want to make adjustments slowly, but surely.
This one has one, two, three, five points
of adjustment that you can sort of move
the insert around however you'd like.
Once you have it so that it's below
or perfectly even with the surface,
you are in good shape.
Now, this may just be the easiest adjustment
we're going to make on this saw.
The fence has a couple set screws, here.
These are actually just this
sort of plastic or nylon material.
They just take a little hex key.
You just turn them left and right.
What it does is adjusts the face of these screws
and how they rest on the fence itself.
Basically, in a nut shell, it's raising either the left wing
or the right wing, which in turn,
adjusts the angle of attack.
What we're looking to do, is have this, of course,
just like the blade, be perfectly 90 degrees to the table.
From what I see here, I've got a little bit of a line.
I can see some light peaking through the bottom.
What I need to do is raise up the left side.
It doesn't take much, just a light little turn
until the light goes away.
Now, you'll notice when you tighten it down,
it may shift a little bit.
It's a good idea to make the adjustment first,
tighten it down, and then fine tune it
when it's nice and tight.
That looks great.
One of the most important adjustments that we're
going to make today is the angle of the fence.
We want it to be parallel with the blade
and also parallel with this miter slot.
The cool thing is since we've already adjusted
the miter slot to the blade, we can use the miter slot
as our reference point to adjust the fence.
Honestly, personally, I find it a lot easier
to set the fence to the miter slot
than the fence to the blade itself.
All of the methods that we discussed before
when we set the miter slot angle, all of those methods
are still applicable to setting the fence, as well.
If you have a dial indicator, if you want to use a square,
whatever you have on hand, all of those methods
are just as valid for this, as well.
For me, the adjustable square method
is the way that I'm going to go.
I will take the fence over.
I also want to point out, here, there are a few
adjustment screws on the fence itself.
You see, we've got one here and one here.
What that does is apply pressure to pads
on the inside of this piece of angle iron
and it pushes up against the fence rail.
Thereby, creating sort of an angle one way or the other.
That's where you have to get into your head
which one of these you tighten in order
to get the result that you're looking for.
Let's see how far off we are.
Let's see if we got lucky.
Basically, I'm going to keep it about
three or four inches from the miter slot.
Loosen the square.
I'm going to push the square all the way up against
this side of the slot, the right side.
Also push the adjustable ruler into the fence.
The fence is locked down at this point as well.
If you make this adjustment with the fence loose,
by the time you lock it down, everything's going to change,
so you have to make these adjustments in the locked position.
Otherwise, it's not going to work.
We're pretty tight up against the fence at this point.
As I move it forward, all the while pushing
in this direction, I see the gap opens up a little bit
to the point where just guessing maybe
we have a 16th of a inch out.
It's not bad.
I didn't really make any adjustments yet.
What I need now is for the front of the fence,
I guess it depends on what side you're standing on.
This side of the fence needs to go that way just a hair.
In order to do that, I either loosen this screw
or I tighten that screw.
I am going to opt for tightening this screw.
It really does not take much.
That was maybe an eighth of a turn.
We'll do the same test.
It didn't really move at all, which tells me this screw
is probably not even engaging the material here.
I'll just keep going with a light turn each time.
That time, I went about a quarter turn.
If you go too far, you could always go back.
I think we may have nailed it.
See, it's even all the way across.
There's no gaps.
It's not forcing the square to the left.
Sometimes, in this case, it looks perfect.
Sometimes, it's actually easier to visualize
if there's a little bit of a gap there
because then you can, with your eye,
monitor the gap and see if it gets smaller or larger.
I'm going to do just that.
A few taps and I've created probably
another 16th of an inch gap.
Now we're going to make sure that that gap
is consistent from the back to the front.
That looks pretty good.
Could you be more accurate than that?
Sure.
There are tools out there that exist.
If that's the type of work you like doing
and you want to spend more time getting this really,
really dialed in, have at it.
This is your fun time if that's the kind of ...
A lot of us are sort of that engineering personality
and enjoy spending time setting up machines
to be precise and accurate as possible.
That's perfectly fine.
I just personally think that this
is enough for most woodworkers.
You don't really need to go any further
than that to produce quality work.
It's up to you how far you want to go,
but for the Wood Whisperer shop, that is enough.
The final adjustment that I'm going
to make today is the riving knife.
I want to make sure that this riving knife
is in the same plane as our blade.
Otherwise, it's not going to do its job.
If it's too far out this way,
it's going to get in the way of the cut.
If it's too far this way,
it's not going to stop a kick back from occurring.
It's very important that it's lined up.
What I like to do is grab my straight edge
and I line the straight edge up with the teeth.
Make sure the front and the back are both resting
on one of the car bide teeth.
Then, I make the adjustments.
Every saw is going to be different.
Make sure you read your manufacturers instructions
for how to make that adjustment.
On this one, there's, what else?
A hex key, four adjustment screws that sort of
allow you to control the tilt and the total direction
of where that thing is lined up.
Again, you just make sure it's nice and even
with those teeth and you should be good to go.
It's a relatively simple adjustment.
Usually, you set it once
and never really have to set it again,
unless you change blades or go to a thin kerf blade
or something like that.
That's really about it.
A very simple, but very, very important that
that gets adjusted properly.
That pretty much wraps it up
for table saw tune up and set up.
It's no secret that if you want to take your craft
to the next level, you have to know
how to tune up your tools.
It's really our connection between us and the material.
If those things aren't tuned up, the road
to better craftsmanship is going to be a very bumpy one.
If you have everything tuned up really nicely,
it's going to be so easy.
You don't want to have to blame the tool
for something going wrong.
You want to be able to blame yourself
and see where you can learn how to do things better.
I remember the first time somebody allowed me
to use a well tuned plane.
Compared to the little block plane that I had,
my little Stanley that I never did anything with,
I took it out of the box and started using it.
I never even sharpened the blade.
It was a night and day difference
and it was a real eye opening experience.
The same thing applies to our power tools.
We need to keep them tuned up,
we need to set them up right the first time,
and we need to remove that as a variable for what might
go wrong in our future learning experiences.
Once you do that, life is good.
Thanks for watching.
We'll catch you next time.
Take care.