Stacked dado in UK is legal after all!

Well, well, well. For all you UK wreckers this should be interesting.

David Free (Great British Woodshop) used a stacked dado head cutter on his show the other day. He explained that he checked with all the appropriate agencies in the UK and was told it is perfectly legal to use one as long as the TS is manufactured so as to accept one in the first place. (Arbor length, I assume.) The only restriction is that the maximum kerf width is 15.5 mm.

Now, who sells a TS in UK that will accept the cutter. In fact, who sells the cutters?

FoggyTown

Reply to
foggytown
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Who ever said dado heads were illegal in the UK ?

Nope.

The legal constraint is about spin-down time with a heavy dado blade. The machine must either come to rest quickly on its own, or it must have brakes fitted to it. It's not trivial to brake a machine with a heavy dado head that's only retained by a LH nut - it can work free when stopping.

You can find the _real_ details under the PUWER 98 regulation on the HSE site

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rules apply to commercial workshops or to sales of new machines.

if you have an old machine with a long arbor, it's not permitted to use it in a commercial workshop (or where liability insurance would require compliance with the latest rules) unless it _also_ meets the stopping requirements. This may not be possible with an old arbor design, it may be expensive with a new arbor design and positive locking.

In practice it's no big deal to achieve this with a 10" saw, so long as you don't use DC injection braking that stops the thing with a sudden bang. It was harder to achieve with spindle moulders (shapers in the US) which caused a lot of replacement heads to be sold a few years ago (and no bad thing too).

Why?

Anything over 10 years old.

Anyone. Machine Mart sell Freuds and usually have them in stock, and you can't get much more commonplace than MM.

Reply to
Andy Dingley

Still there might be some of government restriction as you seem to not be able to find these saws very easily in the UK. Oppositely in the US in some states it is legal to own a radar detector but illegal to use it. Perhaps it is legal to use a dado blade on a saw in the UK but illegal to manufacture one in the UK. Seems like you are in business if you can find the right loop holes . It could be a "grandfathered in" type of acceptance if the law.

Reply to
Leon

Well, all I can say is that Free was happily setting one up and using one on his TV show. He said he checked with the appropriate agencies and gave the info about the cut width as coming from them. Knowing the paranoia of TV producers I would have thought that he was sure about his facts. Still, I don't need one anyway!

FoggyTown

Reply to
foggytown

Reply to
Mike Berger

I hear that handguns were deemed illegal in San Fran yesterday in the local elections .All handguns have to be handed in sometime in the future . what if youn refuse ,the constitution which trumps any local ordinance takes precident .I wonder how the defenseless French feel when the idiots come to burn their houses and kill their women and children......

Reply to
mike hide

re-read the Constitution. It most definitely does NOT trump any local laws.

Reply to
Charlie Self

The intellectually lazy position is to blame some "thing" for a perceived problem. Then you can "fix" the problem but outlawing the "thing." When that doesn't work, you just outlaw more "things." The meteoric rise in armed assaults in both Great Britan and Australia after the most recent outlawing of "gun things" has led them to consider bans on "knife things" and, I believe (in England at least), "whip things."

BruceT

Reply to
Bruce T

Charlie, It's useless to try to reason with the whingers. The only thing more rigid than the barrel of their guns is their thinking

Reply to
mschips

Time out.

To think requires a brain.

Lew

Reply to
Lew Hodgett

If banning hand guns really works, banning cancer should naturally work also.

I wonder how the defenseless French feel when the idiots come to

What goes around come around I suppose. After all, they had "no proof" that riots might on the horizon. Defending certain people 2 1/2 years ago is not working out too good for them now. WMD's apparently have been unleashed in France for the last 2 weeks. Sometimes the writing on the wall is ignored because there is no proof.

Reply to
Leon

Lew, Yes, you're right. My bad :-)

Reply to
mschips

The only place I've seen dado sets listed is in the Machine Mart catalogue which specifically says "NOT to be used on any machine with electric braking". I have more sense than to doubt your word, Andy, but "I don't understand!".

Reply to
Bob Martin

Lew,

I was remiss in pointing out that whingers generally use their (very) little sausage shaped pseudo-brains. Come to think of it, their gun barrels ARE (a LOT) MORE rigid than their thinking :-)

Reply to
mschips

if the brake stops the shaft too quickly, the momentum of the heavy dado blade will unwind the nut and release the dado. this is a Bad Thing from a safety standpoint.

Reply to
bridger

A sawblade is usually retained by a left-handed nut, not because it tightens in use, but because it avoids loosening when rotating, from the force applied to the blade. In fact if you ever start a saw with a loose nut, the nut is likely to _slam_ tight, such that it's difficult to ever get off again. If it's tight enough at the start that it doesn't move, then it will neither tighten nor loosen.

However sudden braking operates in reverse, in terms of applied torque. Brake the arbor and there's a risk that the nut will tend to work itself loose. For a single sawblade this inertia isn't enough to cause a problem, but a dado set may have four or five times the mass and that could be enough to cause a problem. Electric braking with a VFD can be accurately controlled and gentle, but the "cheap" DCI sort (which is still vastly over-priced for the actual cost of it) is rather violent. If you have an industrial cutter with a braked drive, it's usually located over a couple of dowel pins as well as the central arbor shaft. This means custom tooling for a particular manufacturer's arbors and that gets expensive and inflexible.

Reply to
Andy Dingley

Actually a saw blade is usually retained by a nut that tightens in the opposite direction that the blade spins when cutting. That can be right hand or left hand thread. Right hand threads are common on left tilt saws and left hand threads are common right tilt saws. Electronic breaking will tend to have a loosening effect on both right and left handed threads as the blade momentum tries to continue and possible loosen the blade. Basically what you said but the effect is the same on either right or left handed threads.

Reply to
Leon

It is legal to use one. It is not legal to sell a saw that will use one. Similar to what the anti gunners have tried to do with bullets.

Reply to
CW

I suppose that makes as much sense as anything else these days.

FoggyTown

Reply to
foggytown

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