New (to me) Table Saw

I finally bought a table saw. I know, you probably assumed I already had one by all the amazing projects I've been able to do. What? You didn't? Well, you were right then, I guess. Congratulations.

I've been planning to get a table saw for a long time - I really need one to make more accurate cuts, as well as to make rip cuts (rips cuts = along the grain of the wood; cross cuts = across the grain of the wood), and also to make dados and rabbets (grooves in the middle or edge of a piece of wood). It would have helped with a number of my projects: this one, this one, this one, even this one (the paintbrush organizer had a couple weird angles).

Anytime I had to flip a board over to cut longer than my miter saw would cut, or when I had to use my circular saw to rip a board down, I could have used a table saw. Well, now I have one!

This thing is older than me, folks. It's a 1979 model, and when I got it, it was a rust bucket. The handle to raise and lower the saw was broken because the bolt that lifted it was frozen, and someone turned the handle too hard. Here is a list of all the things wrong with it:

• Broken handwheel
• Broke second handwheel when tried to use it (I epoxied that one back together)
• Broken wheel (to wheel around the saw)
• Missing blade guard and splitter 
• Missing arbor wrenches
• Rust EVERYWHERE - the extension tables, the legs, the clamp for the splitter, the saw blade, the arbor nuts holding the blade on, the bolt that raised/lowered the saw and tilted the saw, etc. etc.
• Due to its age, virtually no replacement parts available

Here are a few "before" pictures.

I started out trying a method I saw on YouTube for removing rust - putting a Scotchbrite pad on a 1/4 sheet sander and using WD-40 to sand it out. 

That works if you have some surface rust, but not the kind of rust I was talking about.So I switched to a grinder with flap discs, then to sandpaper, then Loctite Naval Jelly (if you need to remove rust from something you can't submerge, I highly recommend that stuff). There was even an adventure trying to use a sand blaster / make a sand blaster in there, but we won't go into that (it technically worked, but was a huge mess and I moved on to using the chemical rust remover instead).

After I got the majority of the rust out and was mostly down to bare metal, I painted all the formerly rusty surfaces with POR 15. It's made for cars, and is fairly expensive ($30 for a pint). But it works great (stops rust without going all the way to bare metal), and I already had it on hand, so I covered all those surfaces with it.

After I did that, I bought some enamel spray paint and painted the extension tables, the saw inset plate, the miter gauge, and the rip fence.

Next I was able to completely clean out the inside, and get all the rust off that bolt to allow the blade to move up and down smoothly. Once all that was clean, I lubed it up to make sure it wouldn't freeze up again, and reattached the fixed handwheel.

I also had to buy/make a few other parts (some of which I'm still waiting on). I ripped off the ruler when I was getting rid of rust, so needed a new one of those. Also needed a handwheel to replace the busted one, a new set of wheels, some arbor wrenches (to remove and install the saw blades), and a splitter (which helps prevent kickback, which is when the cut wood comes back together after getting cut and binds up the blade, forcing the spinning blade to shoot the piece of wood back towards the operator). I actually ended up making a couple of those splitters out of some 16 GA sheet metal and an angle grinder. Since it doesn't raise and lower with the table saw, I wanted one that will work for the majority of my cuts (lower blade, around 3/4-1" high), and then one for when the blade is raised to its max height.

 

I'm pretty happy with how it's all turned out. This is a SOLID table saw - if it wasn't, I wouldn't have bought it. But it runs well, and now that I've fixed it up and fine-tuned it, I just need to start doing some projects on it!