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I bought a 18" Jet (JWB18 i believe) from the Big Tool Store about ten years ago and love it. I wanted the bigger table because I cut quite a bit of 8/4 hardwood for rocking horses and it makes it easy to handle the bigger pieces. Mine has the European guides and the lower guides are a little fiddly to adjust but they might have fixed it by now. I finally had to change the tires this year. Great saw.
RonB
Delta and Jet aren't THAT swappable. Some bolt-ons come in 2 different flavors because of this. Maybe you can use all of the risers interchangably, but I don't know for sure.
I've got an 18" Jet also. It has been fine... interestingly enough I've never had a drift problem. No matter the blade I've been able to track it such that cuts run parallel to the fence with no fence skewing. Jet has stiffened up the frame since I got mine (also about 10 years ago) but otherwise it seems to be the same saw.
The only time I had an issue was with really big, thick and heavy pieces of wood where I was stretching the limits of the saw's table. As a result I picked up a 36" Crescent that I should have up and running this coming summer...
John
Agreed - Jet probably has more similarity to Powermatic than Delta but even those are different. They appear to share some of the same major parts, castings, etc. When I was looking at 14" lathes years ago the Jets and Powermatics appeared have very similar leg and body castings.
RonB
Define effective. If you mean to capture 90=95% of the dust, yes, my Laguna LT16HD falls in that range with a 1100 CFM DC.
Resawing wider boards is the the toughest to collect since much of the dust becomes trapped inside the wide cut.
My old Rockwell Delta BS has a hexagonal shape, one of the things they cheapened to round shape on the newer models. I can raise and lower my guide bar with the saw running, no problem.
I would not buy, or want, a cheap BS. I could live with a cheaper (not cheap) table saw, but a band saw has too much going on to keep you busy fussing with and never getting right, or to stay right.
My saw never needs any adjustments unless I change blades, which only happens if I break a blade (rare) or it gets too dull.
If I were in the market, I'd either buy something like you have, or go for a used commercial saw if I couldn't afford one like yours.
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