Quotehorrido - 4/25/2012 7:21 AM
Nice work and I love the cross cut 45 angles you must have the saw on a perfect zero tolerance how the heck did you get it that tight? I need to get my saw that good mine is a little off.
Tweaking a saw just takes patience. Mine, fortunately, is fairly easy to set up but the job still takes an afternoon, a few cigars, more patience than I usually have, and a good supply of scrap lumber. In this shot, the red arrows point to a couple of adjusting bolts. The bolt on the left sets the 45 degree angle and the one on the right handles the 90 degree angle. The green arrow points to the adjustment ring used to set the blade at 90 degrees to the fence. The first thing I do is adjust the 90 degree bolt in the back to set the blade at a perfect 90 degree angle to the base. I sneak up on this angle by making test cuts and checking for square with a precision square (Incra). Don't trust anything less than a square you KNOW is 90 degrees. After I get the blade perfectly straight in the up and down direction I loosen the ring pointed out by the green arrow and incrementally adjust it until the cut is perfectly square across the board. Once those two operations are completed successfully the 45 degree angle across the base is automatically taken care of. Then I go back to the bolt on the left in the back and adjust the 45 degree angle of the tilted blade as is shown in this shot. Like I said, these operations try my patience.
I forgot to point out that blade deflection under load can skew your adjustments so even with a perfectly set up saw I usually wind up tweaking the miter joints with a big 45 degree chamfer bit in the router table. Softer woods don't usually upset things too much though. The harder woods tend to cause the blade to move ever so slightly out of line sometimes.