Brad_Nailor's Blog at LumberJocks.com

New Grizzly G0690 or Used '01 Delta Unisaw? :UPDATE:

Brad_Nailor — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:09:10 GMT

I asked everyone to give me their opinion here as to which saw to purchase, a new Griz, or a gently used Uni? Well I made arrangements with the seller to go look at the saw, and thinking I was going to like what I saw I brought along a down payment to seal the deal if I liked it. Well…...I LIKED IT! I’m telling you guys….this saw was in PERFECT condition. Not a scratch on it anywhere..the fence was tight and moved smoothly and locked up solid. The tabletop was dead flat. It fired up with a powerful whir and ran smoothly…would defiantly pass the nickel test. I gave it a thorough look over and even got inside the cabinet with a drop light. Cabinet mounted heavy looking trunnion. The hand wheels spun smoothly and the wing nuts locked them down tight. The saw was the upgraded version of the Uni at the time of purchase( he showed me the original invoice form Sept ‘01) which meant it came with the Beismeyer fence (the body of the fence is even Delta blue) and an upgraded on off switch located on the fence rail with a mushroom off button that you can hit with your leg. The guy saved all the lit including the assembly instructions, the manual for the saw and the fence, and he even cut the Delta label with all the serial numbers off the packing box and saved it! No exxgaeration..if it didn’t have saw dust on it I would have thought it was brand new. This guy struck me as someone who wanted to do woodworking as a hobby and bought the best table saw at the time, and very gently used it a little over the last 8 years, and he took immaculate care of the saw. The mobile base is really nice and the saw rolls really smoothly on it. Needless to say, I shook his hand and said you have a deal..I didn’t even bother to haggle with him…in my opinion that saw is worth more than a grand in the condition its in. I am going back first thing Saturday morning to pick up my new Unisaw and bring it home…hopefully by Saturday afternoon it will be back together and cutting wood in my shop! I am so psyched to get this saw….talk about the planets aligning themselves perfectly..I never have good luck like this!
(Blatant tool gloat) I AM THE PROUD OWNER OF A DELTA UNISAW!!!

New Grizzly G0690 or Used '01 Delta Unisaw? Opinions wanted!

Brad_Nailor — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:16:06 GMT

OK..
I was about to order (literally, I was about to order the saw) my Grizzly G0690 when I see an add on Craigslist for a 2001 Delta unisaw with a 52” real Beismeyer fence, table board and legs and a Delta mobile base. I have been emailing with the seller and he assures me that the saw is like brand new..he bought it new in ‘01 and used it rarely for home improvement projects and some cabinet making. The saw is dialed in perfect and the table is dead flat..no runout on the arbor…its like new. It looks real nice in the pics in the add. I am torn now..he wants $1000.00 for it..the Griz is $1300.00 with shipping…Soooooo Do I opt for the NEW saw with the smaller fence and some real nice features….or do I opt for a tried and true classic, solid Delta Unisaw….with a REAL 52” Beismeyer thats 9 years old, but not used in a commercial setting. I maybe could even bargin him down to 800 or 900 so I would be saving money. Both saws are 3HP single phase 220V, so theres no trade off in power…

Help me I need opinions…right now I am really leaning twords the Delta…..But I like the Griz, too…

Don K's Mobile Table Saw Stand Sketchup Model

Brad_Nailor — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:15:31 GMT

I have been threatening to buy a new table saw for a few months now and as all the planets seem to be aligned I am finally going to take the plunge…before i end up spending the money on Christmas! I am going to get a Grizzly G0690. I came to this decision thanks to allot of great input from the people on this site in particular Don K. He owns this saw along with a few other Grizzly pieces and doesn’t hesitate to sing the praises of this saw. After the Shop Fox rolling base he purchased basically collapsed, he designed and built this stand for his saw. He was kind enough to share the details with me, and you can see it in the pictures of his shop. Of course being the Sketch-A-Holic I am I had to do a model of the stand complete with renders and exploded views. Click the link below each image to see it full size..

Here is the stand, raw SU output.

http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o190/fella77/tsstand_1.jpg

The exploded view…

http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o190/fella77/tsstand3.jpg

Here is the dimensioned view…

http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o190/fella77/tsstand5.jpg

And a rendered image

http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o190/fella77/20091109151744_12m56s.jpg

I like his design allot, the way the saw sits in a pocket to keep it from being too high off the floor. Don says that with the casters unlocked, the saw moves with a one handed shove…try that with a typical rolling base. I am going to put this together this weekend so as soon as my saw gets here I can put it in the stand before the cast iron goes on!

Grizzly Free Shipping Offer ends Sept. 19th....

Brad_Nailor — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:40:22 GMT

Hey all you fellow procrastinators..

I have been waiting to finish my barn building project so I can order my new G0690 table saw…just don’t have the room or the time to deal with a new saw. I was home sick from work today so out of curiosity I called Grizz and asked them when the free shipping gag was ending…and to my horror he said Sept. 19th…this Saturday! Wow I’m still not quite ready to take delivery of the saw yet but thats $144.00 I would save on the shipping. He told me they will delay shipping by up to 2 weeks and if you pay with a credit card they don’t charge the card till they ship the item.
He did say that there is a chance they might extend it…but it’s a crapshoot..he couldn’t say for sure…

Checkerboard End Grain Cutting Board #2: Putting it together

Brad_Nailor — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 03:26:28 GMT

Ok, when I last left you this cutting board was just a Sketchup design. After a trip to the hard wood dealer and some basic milling I arrived at this very hefty glue up. I tried to do the ripping on my BOSCH, but even with a thin kerf blade it was a little too much for that saw, so I took over my buddies cabinet shop! Here are some shots of the first glue up..

Here is the blank, out of the clamps and sanded to 1 1/2” thick..

Ok, now the fun part..After squaring one end up on the radial arm, I cut 1 5/8” strips out of the glue up and flip every other one. Then another glue up..Here is where things started to get a little dicey. It never occurred to me that these were laminated pieces not solid wood and I might consider gluing it up in sections to keep it straight…or using some solid wood cauls on the ends to squeeze the pieces together. You can see the top left of the board curving in from the clamps.

definitely a slight alignment problem..everything was getting skewed slightly by the clamping pressure..

Here is the board out of the clamps and sanded with a dual drum sander to 1 1/2”. You can clearly see the left side bending in..

Well it is what it is, so I just made the best of it. I carefully cut the sides down trying to strike a balance between keeping things square and perpendicular and making the boarder look even. Here is the board after I cut the border, and polish sanded it from 80 to 180 with a pneumatic orbital palm sander..

Not too bad..it looks ok. After this I took it home a routed a 1/8” radius on all the edges and sanded it to 250. Then multiple coats of mineral oil. I have a light and heavy viscosity mineral oils and I use the heavy one for end grain boards..it slows the absorption down a little. The end grain really soaks up the oil!

Check out my project posting for the finished pictures!

Checkerboard End Grain Cutting Board #1: Skecthup Model....ya, you heard me right...of a cutting board

Brad_Nailor — Fri, 29 May 2009 03:11:25 GMT

I know what your thinking…this lunatic made a Sketchup model of a cutting board? Can’t he just wing it?
Ya sure, I have made quite a few cutting boards with and without plans. The few I have done plans for were in Autodcad, to work out the design details, but this is the first time I have used SU for planning a cutting board. I wanted to be able to know exactly how much material I was going to need, and how it was going to have to be glued up so it would come out exactly as I wanted.

This is actually the first custom cutting board I have been paid to make. In a previous project post I showed a cutting board I made for a friend to give to his wife for mothers day. A neighbor of his saw it and wanted one of his own. My friend showed him pictures I had sent him of the end grain checkerboard cutting boards I made and he wanted one, only full size 12×16, 1 1/2” thick with a half size border around it. And he wanted the checks to be 1 1/2” square. So I needed to be precise about how I glued up the blanks, so I would have enough material to make sure it came out the right size. SU is perfect for this, I did three different models, the first one shows the first glue up with all the material sizes. The length takes into account how many cuts I need at 1 1/2” including saw kerfs.

The next model shows the second glue up. After the 1st glue up is scraped, flattened, and sanded to 1 1/2” thick, (Usually I would plane it flat, but this one wont fit through my planer!) I take 1 5/8” rips and set them on end and offset every other row…

The last model shows the finished board as close to the dimensions that the customer wanted I can get while maintaining the other criteria. Sanded to 1 1/2” and the edge squares trimmed to 3/4”

Of course another great reason to do a SU model would be so I can use cutlist. Even though this isn’t a large complicated piece of furniture with lots of parts it is still a very useful program to figure out exactly how much material I need and what the exact board footage is so i can price it accurately. I used the first glue up blank to run the cutlist, once for the maple and once for the walnut

So it turns out I needed just under 2.5 board feet of each type of wood. Where I buy my hard woods, 8/4 hard maple is $6.35 b/f, and 8/4 walnut is $10.65 b/f. So my material cost is around $42.00. The walnut is pricey…maybe I should stick to all hard maple butcher blocks! So I bought all my lumber today and spent some time planing it down to 1 3/4” thick…but I am thinking…once I do the first glue up, if I have to use a drum sander to flatten and size the blank….. that could take a while to loose 1/4”. Maybe I should take my blank thickness down to 1 5/8, and just be real careful when I glue it up? What do you guys think?

Slot Car White Board Project- Sketchup Drawings

Brad_Nailor — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 04:16:03 GMT

Recently, I have been sucked into another hobby to my wifes displeasure! I met up with an old friend who I used to race HO scale slot cars with when we were kids. He told me he has a large 1/32” scale slot car setup in his basement and he has a small racing club that meets once a week and races. Well, being the over sized kid I am all it took was one visit and I was hooked! We have several classes of cars we race ( LeMans, Corvette, Muscle Car, NASCAR) and there is allot of information that gets recorded about the races. Now it’s just scribbled on a piece of paper. I remembered I had a large piece of white board I salvaged from another project and a quick trip to the lumberyard cut off bin yielded some great pieces of walnut with a 3/8” edge already milled in them for 3 bucks a piece! So I came up with this design….I wanted to keep it simple..its not fine furniture!

http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o190/fella77/leader_board_b.jpg

http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o190/fella77/leader_board_a.jpg

I am adding a small cove just to give it a little something. I was thinking of doing some maple keys or stripes but again I want to keep it simple and easy to put together. I just have to rip the pieces down, mill the cove miter and assemble.

http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o190/fella77/leader_board_c.jpg

Here is some details on the eraser tray…
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o190/fella77/leader_board_d.jpg

Here is a cross section of the profile..

http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o190/fella77/leader_board_e.jpg

I am thinking probubly a wipe on all in one finish…anyone have any suggestiuons for a wipe on for walnut?

Woodwhisperer Poker Chip Tray #4: Sanding, Sanding and more Sanding....did I mention Sanding?

Brad_Nailor — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:37:18 GMT

OK, let me apologize right up front…I didn’t take any pictures of the next few operations..they were really basic stuff, and I was so focused on completing them I just didn’t think to grab the camera. I last left you when all the trays were glued up and ready for routing. First I did some preliminary sanding of the ends. I clamped the top and bottoms together and installed the belt on my Rigid drum sander. I clamped a temporary straight edge perpendicular to the belt to keep the ends as square as I could. After squaring the ends up I installed a core box bit in my router table to route the shallow grooves in the pieces. I had to double side tape a piece of 1/4” MDF to the table due to the bit being too long and I couldn’t get the groove shallow enough. So after the grooves were routed, I gave the ends a slight round over. With all the routing operations finished, I then began the task of sanding. Most of the pieces were sanded to 150 already, so after sanding all the routed areas to 150 I sanded the rest of the pieces to 220. That was a long and tedious process to get into all the areas inside the holes near the inside edges x 10 separate halves! It was also quite tedious to sand the shallow grooves..I had to use a dowel with sandpaper wrapped around it and try to go with the grain. I ended up just going against the grain till I reached the 220 level and then sanded with the grain to make the sanding scratches disappear. It was a long process but always worth it, because if you chince out on the sanding your finish suffers.

Speaking of finish I was going back and forth between shooting these with cans of Deft or having a friend of mine who works at the same cabinet shop I used to, to spray them with professional catalyzed lacquer. I really don’t mind finishing, but this guy has been spraying lacquer for 15 years, they have a professional spray booth and this stuff covers better than 5 coats of Deft ….in two coats. I would have been spraying cans, in my garage, picking dust and bugs out of the finish. So I had my buddy shoot them …and it was the right descesion..they came out awesome! HERE ARE SOME PICTURES..

I borrowed 20 chips from the guy I am making these for so I could test out the fit..

So, all thats left is to install the little rare earth magnets in the holes, maybe throw a couple coats of fine cabinet wax on them and they will be done!

Woodwhisperer Poker Chip Tray #3: Making progress...and lots of chips!

Brad_Nailor — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 04:20:22 GMT

Ok, after a brief side track, here we go again with the poker chip tray saga..

Where I last left you, I had gotten all the strips glued up into blanks. I had to wait about a week or so, to take a day off and pay a visit to my old boss and his wonderful wide belt sander. Sorry but I didn’t take any pictures of the process but it went something like this… The trays were only 10” long, and you cant put anything through the sander thats smaller than 16”, so I butted each tray end to end and sent them through. I fished a piece of long scrap out of the scrap bin that was the same starting thickness as my trays and sent that in after the last piece at the end. I also wasn’t going to be able to feed and catch the pieces as they emerged from the sander, so I set up a piece of MDF on some horses and the pieces dropped nicely on it. I had to remove a considerable amount of material ( I was 1/4” over) so I loaded a 60 grit belt and that made quick work of the uneven edges and excess glue. Then I kept sanding all the way to a final thickness of 1”, changing belts as I went for a final grit of 120. Here are some shots of the sanded pieces…

I love that wide belt sander..the blanks are perfectly flat and sanded nicely to 120..

I don’t’ have a drill pres so I ventured over to my buddies cabinet shop to use his ( it pays to know allot of people who own cabinet shops!). I ended up cutting my blanks to length on his RAS. Honestly, I should have waited till I got home..I ended up with some tearout..the blade isn’t the greatest in that RAS, and at home I have a 12” Makita SCMS with a pretty nice blade in it and a zero clearance insert.

Once the blanks were all cut to length, I then cut the walnut pieces to the same size. I was using a stop, so everything would be the same length. I then clamped the matched blanks together and clamped that to the drill press table and bored my 40 mm holes. I bought a brand new carbide tipped forstner bit and it payed off. I cut through the blanks like butta…no burning at all!

The drill press I was using was a little old..I think it had a bit of a run-out problem cause the holes weren’t perfectly straight..but nothing I couldn’t’ clean up with some sanding. I then set up the walnut pieces for boring. Marc’s method was to tape the two pieces together….I forgot that, so i just did it like this..

I apologize for the crappy picture…that was with my cell phone. Here is a couple shots of the raw pieces, not yet sanded…

Now it was time to really put the oscillating spindle sander I got for Xmas to work..

I was using the standard 80 grit sleeve that came with the sander, but I went to Home Depot and despite what I had read in the blogs, they offer a replacement pack of 80 grit sleeves in all the sizes, but heres the good part..it also has a full set of 120 grit sleeves as well!

After thoroughly sanding the holes to 120, it was time to glue on the outside strips. After marking all the pieces so they would line up properly I started glueing..

Heres some trays out of the clamps and waiting for the next operation..

Heres a close up. Still got allot of sanding to do..

OK, so next operation will be rounding over the outside edges, and then routing a shallow groove over each chip slot, top and bottom so they can be stacked when the covers are off. So hopefully in the next episode that will be where were at!

Woodwhisperer Poker Chip Tray #2: Bad blades, lots of strips, and not enough clamps...

Brad_Nailor — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 04:36:31 GMT

So I finally started doing some ripping last week. I got my 40T blade sharpened, and I threw together a half ass thin strip ripping jig. The results of that was five pieces that when placed together you could read an eye chart through the gaps between them ! The maple was difficult to push through the saw and I was getting awful saw blade marks and really rough edges, not to mention that my thin strip jig was binding up on the maple. So frustrated, I grabbed my credit card and was determined to remedy the situation. 5 days later, there was a brand new Forrest WWII thin kerf tablesaw blade (review Here) and a thin strip rip jig (review here). So after getting the blade mounted and the saw adjusted I got to work stripping up my material’s.

The Forrest produced perfect edges for gluing and the jig worked great to make the pieces consistent. So once I got all my pieces cut I started doing glue ups. Here is a shot of the first “half” in the clamps.
I used a glue roller to apply the glue quickly and evenly. I also sandwiched the glue up between two pieces of scrap maple to help distribute the clamp pressure. I put aside the outside walnut strips..they don’t go on till after all the holes get bored. Here is three “half’s” drying in the clamps

Unlike Marc who owns more clamps than anyone I know, I can only do three glue ups at once. I am actually going to use only the Bessy’s from now on. They have such nice even clamping pressure and the jaws stay parallel to each other. They are just so much easier to use than the pipe clamps. Sure they are more expensive…but you get what you pay for. Here is a shot at all the other “half’s” waiting their turn in the clamps.

So, once I get the glue ups done I will be paying a visit to my old employer, to “borrow” his wide belt sander. The half’s are all around 1 1/4” thick now. I will wide belt them down to 1” and they will be nice and flat and consistant in thickness.