Charlie Plesums
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- 1,523
- Location
- Austin, Texas
Walking past a construction site in Hong Kong a couple weeks ago, I saw a skil saw attached to a sheet of plywood, blade up, resting between two saw horses. No apparent fence, so I was horrified by the risk of kick-back even more than the risk of an open blade, and worried about how anyone would get a straight cut with that setup.
Just as we were passing the opening in the construction fence, somebody walked up to it, reached underneath and turned the saw on, slapped the work piece on the plywood table, and suddenly I saw the secret... the area on the far side of the blade was another sheet of plywood on a track. The workpiece was against a small fence on the "slider" and they had a sliding tablesaw. Why did I pay tens of thousands of dollars for my sliding table saw - that one must have cost under $100 and appeared to work perfectly.
No I don't have a picture (so maybe it didn't happen?). A snapshot would have just shown a scary blade up skil saw. You needed a movie to see a simple elegant solution, and we didn't have time to wait for another worker to need to use the saw.
Just as we were passing the opening in the construction fence, somebody walked up to it, reached underneath and turned the saw on, slapped the work piece on the plywood table, and suddenly I saw the secret... the area on the far side of the blade was another sheet of plywood on a track. The workpiece was against a small fence on the "slider" and they had a sliding tablesaw. Why did I pay tens of thousands of dollars for my sliding table saw - that one must have cost under $100 and appeared to work perfectly.
No I don't have a picture (so maybe it didn't happen?). A snapshot would have just shown a scary blade up skil saw. You needed a movie to see a simple elegant solution, and we didn't have time to wait for another worker to need to use the saw.