Hi. This is my dad's homemade table saw.
He built this as a second table saw to go along with his Felder table saw.
And he built it partially using parts from his Felder table saw
that needed to be replaced because they weren't made very well.
So, he re-used the sliding table from the Felder.
Which has got a little bit of play in it.
Which is why it had to be replaced. And also the Arbor mount bearings
from the Felder needed to be replaced.
And he reused that part for this particular saw.
So, let's have a closer look inside this saw.
So, this is the bearing block
and arbor from the Felder that needs to be replaced.
And my dad made an arbor mount out of welded together pieces of
plate steel and angle iron.
It's powered with a flat belt right here.
Which, actually my dad used an old timing belt.
And, that goes down to a big three horsepower motor.
And that motor has actually got a wooden pulley on it.
And that's how this saw is powered.
The arbor is completely fixed in place. It doesn't tilt or move up and down.
So, the only way you can adjust the depth of cut
is to tilt the whole table.
Although that's a very awkward sort of thing, and with the table level
this table has eleven hundred millimeter depth of cut.
That's about 4 3/Th of an inch so
quite deep. But the problem is
you can't easily lower the blades so it's always cutting that deep
unless you tilt the table.
So the only way you could make a less than full depth of cut
on this saw, is to put some spacer blocks in here.
And then the table will be tilted.
At which point you can't actually use it to cross-cut slide.
So, it's not something that my dad ever used.
But it does have the facility for doing a less than full depth of cut.
The motor is this really big farm-duty motor.
And it has a really strong starting torque.
So, the belt always ends up flipping a little bit while it starts.
And to keep the belt from coming off there's a block of wood here.
And there's another piece up here.
And, between those two that keeps the belt from slipping off when it's starting.
Once it's running, the nature of the crown pulley, helps keep the belt on.
There's a simple sort of tracking adjustment
cut out. So the motor is mounted on this plank here.
And then, these two bolts here and here
allow this plank to be moved side to side
so that the pulley angle changes a little bit so that the
tracking can be adjusted.
Now, flat belts need an awful lot of tension
to operate properly. So there's a bolt here
for tightening it. And that connects up to
a piece of angle iron attached to the board that the motor's mounted on.
So, when that bolt is tightened that pulls the motor
away from the saw blade which tightens the pulley.
The whole saw can be moved on wooden wheels.
And this mechanism here is a sort of a wheel lock.
So, if I tighten this bolt
that forces this piece against the wheel
and prevents it from turning.
And, so it locks the wheels.
The rip fence, of course, is also homemade.
But, because it needs a fair bit of
edge here, to clamp to
it can really only move out about thirteen inches
or thirty-three centimeters from the blade.
So, this saw isn't really useful for ripping up sheet goods.
But, my dad never really worked with sheet goods very much so
this saw was intended for cutting up rough lumber.
And, this is actually a lot wider than
any sort of boards that he would get from the saw mill.
So, it was far enough.
With a sliding table on the saw coming from Felder
It accepts all the peripherals that clamp on here from the Felder.
So, I'm just gonna put the table extension on here.
Which is a part accessory
that Felder has got for their saws.
So, now I've got my table extended and now
I'm gonna cut the homemade crosscut fence on here..
So, this fence is not adjustable. But the nice thing is it's always ninety degrees.
And you can count on that.
And now to cut a piece of wood on this saw.
I do have to admit this saw has always intimidated me a little bit.
It is a bit of a monster of a saw but
Let me show you how it runs.