Hi. This is my dad's Felder KFS36 table saw.
It's a table saw shaper
and slot mortiser combination,
And it was a brand new design when my dad bought it
back in 1986.
They hadn't fully optimized that design yet, at the time,
so it's got a few awkward things.
So I'll go through it and show you how this saw works,
and what's awkward.
The table saw controls are on this side.
And by loosening this locking thing,
on this knob here,
You can then change the angle on the saw.
It's quite hard to operate this lever,
so not as elegant as
a turn knob that you can just adjust the angle with.
And the depth of cut,
is adjusted by turning this. There used to be
a plastic handle that you could plug on to here,
but that broke shortly after my dad got the saw,
so he made this handle for it,
which is made out of wood. At some point
he accidentally threw it in the wood stove,
fished it back out before it was burned up so,
its a little bit burnt. So that goes on here
and then
turn that to raise the blade.
It's a bit hard to turn.
The rip fence attaches to this dovetail that goes
all the way around the saw.
And the fence just hooks onto here.
And then you have to tighten this by quite a few turns
to get it to lock.
It's a bit of an odd fence. It also has the ability to
adjust the angle of the fence,
and that's not that useful for a table saw,
But this fence was also the jointer fence.
So that's why you can set the angle on it.
It's a bit of an awkward to adjust fence.
To just adjust it by a little bit,
you kind of have to bump it a little bit
and it's very stubborn,
and it's not terribly stiff.
So I'm not terribly fond of this fence.
The other that's annoying with this fence
is if you want to move it close to the blade,
it interferes with the sled,
so moving it like this
you can only get it this far in and then hits on here.
Right about to here for instance.
Now you hit the sled.
And you wouldn't think this would happen very often,
but to me this happens quite a lot.
And you might have something set off and then you just want to
square the end off another piece,
so you want to use the sled without moving the fence.
So you can see the camera shake a little bit in the last shot.
Part of that is because this saw if frickin' heavy.
I'm also using a cheap tripod with a heavy camera
on a wooden floor,
but this saw, the base of it is actually made out of concrete.
And the saw altogether probably weighs about a ton.
The saw has a sliding table
and this is sort of an in between
of this small rectangular sliding table
of the connecting 70's
and the really long format style sliding tables of today,
It's got quite a range of motion but
not really enough for making it
usable for rough cuts so first we'll go here,
down
here.
The cross-cut fence that came with this saw
is kind of a dumb design.
So, you put it on there with this pin here.
And you put that on here.
And attach to a locking nut down here.
And then you have to manually set this thing
to a 90 degree angle every time.
There used to be a scale that went on here
but it's not really accurate enough so
it's kind of dumb to not have a reliable
cross-cutting thing so my dad never
actually ended up using this fence very much at all.
Instead he came up with something homemade.
So, this is what my dad came up with,
which is essentially
some big iron parts bolted together.
And that locks on here.
And then this adjusts like so.
And this is not at all adjustable.
For non-90 degree cuts you could always use
the other fence, but this fence
being non-adjustable it's always square at 90 degrees.
This table is a little bit narrow for making cross-cuts,
but this is where a really clever
Felder sort of thing comes in because there's this extension
tables that can be clamped to these dovetails
that go around the saw.
So, by clamping one of these on here
you now have a reasonable width for making cross-cuts.
So, the shaper controls for the saw are
just like the table saw controls
and they are in the back of the saw.
So, to turn the saw to a shaper
you lower the blade all the way
and you open this here,
and drop in the spindle.
Now we're gonna switch this to shaper mode.
Now we re-routed the saw so that
this is shaper, whereas this says it's shaper here.
The reason for that is
by putting it here, we can run the shaper backwards,
which in the regular configuration,
the slot mortiser and the planer would be
the same motor and that motor can run both directions
So we put it on the mortiser mode now
and then we can start the machine up.
Back when they made this saw, they weren't required to have
any sort of electronic brake on this saw
so the tools really take a long time to spin down.
For example, in saw mode
the blade spins for a really, really long time.
Not terribly safe.
I usually end up running out of patience and
stopping it by rattling a piece of wood against the blade.
So, back to the shaper.
This thing here is for holding down the stock.
So I've never actually personally used
the shaper on this saw.
I don't really like things with molding very much.
And with the shaper this big, you can't just
run a little work piece through to show it.
So, I'm just gonna take this apart again.
So, this is one of the coolest features about this machine,
which is how you cut tenons with it.
So this machine will cut tenons in one pass,
and because both cutter heads are mounted
to the same shaft, it cuts them very consistently.
Now this machine can cut various tenons
that you can't really cut on a table saw
with a tenon jig. But since this one is asymmetrical,
and it's got a bevel on one side,
this one's got a bevel just on one side
to be part of a door. And this one again
is asymmetrical. And the way some of these are
cut, especially some of the really long ones,
is using these really big cutter heads.
And these cutter heads have
replaceable blade thingies so you can put
different ones in there for different widths of cut
and different bevels.
And finally on the left side is a slot mortiser.
And it's just an X/Y table that can move up and down.
And originally this lever was too likely
to hit this table here, so down here
we changed the pivot to be further this way,
so that this end of the lever isn't gonna
hit the table. And the cutter,
the chuck is mounted directly onto the motor
so it always spins at 3500 RPM.
So it cuts cleaner than a hollow chisel mortiser.
Not quite as clean, as fast as a router
but it is able to cut much deeper than a
router is able to cut.
So, that's the Felder KFS36
from 1986. I should add that
Felder table saws have evolved quite a lot
in the last 25 years.