I did not even get to touch the saw until this afternoon. I spent the morning rat killing and picking up a power cord to attach to the saw. After attaching the 10-3 cord I started the saw up for the first time with out a blade attached as I wanted to make sure all the safety switches worked properly. Yup, it starts up OK. This saw has a start switch that you turn
1/4" turn and the motor starts. If you hit the red kill switch, step on the break, or open the top and bottom doors the switch automatically turns in the opposite direction 1/4" turn and turns the saw off. The next step was to put a 1/2" blade on and check tracking and set the guides. Boring! The blade immediately tracked to the center of both wheels and no tracking adjustment was necessary. Cool. With the Rikon I some times had to help that adjustment out with a pop of my palm on the lower end of the top wheel. Adjusting the 10 point ceramic guides was straight forward and non eventful. Cool. I manually rotated the top wheel several times to insure that the weld was not going to be a problem with respect to the ceramic guides and immediately noticed that the top wheel did not feel like it was going to grind a blister on my finger like the old Craftsman and Rikon did. Cool. Time to power up with the blade mounted. The instructions indicate to start for a split second and turn the machine off when using a new blade to again insure that every thing is OK. This is easily done by turning the start switch 1/8" turn and letting go. It springs back to off automatically. Kinda like turning the key to start the starter on a car. Every thing seemed OK. I started the saw again and left it running and noticed a loud squeal and then it went away after the blade came up to speed. I immediately tightened the drive belt a bit more and the squeal was gone. The saw is very quiet with just the common tapping noise that the blade makes as the weld goes through the guides. Checking the fence and table alignment to the blade, I found both were dead on. Test cuts with that 1/2" blade through 3/4" oak were pretty darn smooth considering this was 1 of 3, "throw in with the deal", blades. I will be anxious to see how the Laguna Resaw King does on veneers. Next a relatively narrow resawing test. I had a piece of 7/8" thick oak 2.5" wide by 28" long. After adjusting the fence for blade drift I started cutting 1/16" thick slabs off of that 7/8" thick piece of wood. I probably would not have to sand before gluing to a substrate as the surface was similar to the back side of Formica maybe a touch rougher. The resawing and guiding was effortless and the pieces were consistent in thickness from end to end and top to bottom. I got 8 pieces. Is that good? :~) Wider pieces tomorrow.- posted
18 years ago