Re: Panel saw kit

I was considering building the whole thing myself as well. The pipe is a good idea. I just have to figure a way to make a glide the saw can run on smoothly down the rail (pipe). The acrylic blade may be the most expensive part of the whole thing! bg

I've been toying with building one when I set up my shop in the ne house we are building. I looked closely at the one at my local hom depot, and it looks like you can use u-bolts with a bunch of washers o it - these would ride over the pipe. I was considering turning th washers on a pen madred from that high density slick plastic (can' remember the initials for it), then cutting them to thickness on bandsaw

-- makesawdust

Yep, I made it. Here is my reply to the original post on 1/7/05:

I made this one:

The main issue seems to be the track that the panel rests on and slides on while being cut. My friend told me that his was a little tough to push through, and even with the rabbets had a tendency to gather sawdust. So I had the bright idea to mount skateboard wheels instead of the wood strip his uses. I have yet to get them all perfectly aligned (for a number of reasons) and am thinking of redoing it and going with a wood strip with teflon on top. If you're interested, I'll look around and see if I can find the plans.....

Jeff

I used that method of building a cheap linear bearing for a project once. I used a heavy Ubolt and some kind of nylon spacers from the little bin drawers at ace hardware. it worked fine.

it was a LONG time ago, but I seem to remember using muffler type U bolts with the nuts on the saw base side and slices of teflon tubing covering the U bolt (saddle bracket?) where it slid on the pipes..

I don't think that the track of the blade was adjustable... I think we had a fixed fence/slide on the bottom and sort of a miter fence to set the width...

mac

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