Guess I didn't say it didn't take a moment or two to set up, a little planning and some fine grit sandpaper on the fence of your sled to keep things from sliding. BTW you can go left because you can extend the quill to get the table far enough away from the headstock to clear it. I don't know if you can get the full 45 degrees though.
No argument that if you were buying a saw that a tilting table would be a poor design. If you bought a Shopsmith, however, you were not buying a saw, you were buying a multi-purpose tool. As with any such beast some design compromises are requied for each purpose in order to allow for the other purposes. There is just no way to produce a machine that does those specific 5 functions without a tilting table. I agree that if a person has the room for all stand alone tools and the desire to dedicate that space to woodworking tools then a Shopsmith is clearly not their best choice.
I can understand that! Too many things need Shopsmith specific stuff, and they do seem quite proud of their stuff given the price. Actually that would be expected for a niche product with a small market and small volumes.
;-) Dave Hall
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." -- G.B. Shaw