Here is the iPad stand I made for my wife. She loves it!

I just have to say that I finally feel like I have a working shop. Boards are flat, corners square, every single cut I make feels safe and easy. I’m not getting overconfident by any measure but I’m finding it much simpler to make my plans become reality.

I’m in wood nerd heaven, at least until winter hits.

So earlier today I got to work dressing some of the hardwood for my projects, specifically the Canarywood and Pau Ferro. Here is my impression of my new equipment so far:

Rikon 6” Jointer
The jointer did a really nice job edge jointing both woods. The Pau Ferro had one face that was already dead flat, so I didn’t need to face joint it. I did face joint the canarywood which had a bit of a cup, but it performed fairly well. Had a little chatter on the first few passes, but as the face flattened out that went away. I’m satisfied, but I did have to take an inch off the board before I could face joint it. The curse of the 6” jointer has already struck!

DeWalt DW735 Planer
This is a hit or miss thing. I’m getting a fairly significant amount of snipe even with the extension tables installed. I know this is a common issue with any lunchbox planer, but I know the DW735 has less than most and it was more than I was expecting. Not the end of the world because the surface finish on this is amazing! Glass smooth, dead flat, just wonderful. I’ll need to ensure I cut my material long.

Grizzly G0690 Table Saw
I love this saw. A ton of power, good fit and finish, I love the fence. I was ripping with a CMT 30T Glue-Line rip blade and a Grizzly ZCI and I could not tell the jointer edge from the ripped edge. I cut some test mitres with my Incra 1000SE and everything is so precise. Love it, love it, love it.

I should have some simple projects completed this week or next!

- iPad stand for my wife made from Pau Ferro
- Picture frame for family friends from Canarywood
- A simple open-top box for the wife’s assorted papers, likely from Walnut
- Cutting boards and more cutting boards for Christmas
- Some candle holder centrepieces for Christmas

I really have to figure out if the shop is quiet enough to work at night otherwise I am not going to have enough time to finish all of this! I have a two year old sleeping on the other side of the shared wall. I plan to test it out during his nap time this weekend, and we will see what happens.

This was a dreadfully busy weekend so that’s all I had time to do, but I’m happy! I have a fully functional Grizzly 0690 in my shop!

Now here is the funny bit. I now have two excess guide tubes. One is about 62” the other 80”. These are nice square iron tubes, fairly heavy (20 and 25lbs or so) and I have no idea what to do with them. Grizzly hasn’t asked for them back although I would be happy to ship them back if they’d like them. If they don’t what do I do with them?

Central beam in a torsion box work table? Hang em up in the rafters with a bunch of magnetic hooks and use them as tool storage? I have no clue!

I’ve promised my wife a little stand for her new iPad, and I have some 3/4 black walnut that’s been stickered for a year in the basement that I’ve been wanting to use. I think I will likely make one like this one from Amazon. Simple to make, some routed edges and one mitred cut. A good little starter project to get used to the new saw and router table.

I might actually get a project done this weekend!

I popped a 50T CMT General Purpose blade on the saw and checked the parallelism of the mitre slot to the blade and it was out by about 7 thou. Easy enough to adjust on a cabinet saw (thank goodness) and now it’s under 1 thou. I put my Incra mitre guide on and fired it up. I put a scrap of 3/4” ply up the mitre gauge and pushed it through the blade.

First impressions:

Huge
Solid
Powerful
Sounds downright mean

Now, this is coming from someone used to a portable jobsite saw, and this was only 3/4” ply, but I could not tell the saw was running by touch. There is zero vibration. Additionally, there was just no resistance when the wood hit the blade. The sound didn’t even change. The wood was just suddenly in two pieces.

This is not likely a big deal to most of you, but this is the first real saw I’ve ever used and holy cow what a difference.

I can’t wait to get the tube and fence on and really get to work on this thing. Despite my issues with the tube, I’m in love.

To my delight, UPS delivered the replacement guide tube on Friday afternoon, so I popped out to the shop early this morning to install it. I was honestly thinking the box looked quite big, and once I started opening it, I realized why.

Grizzly sent me the 80” tube from the G0691, not the 60” tube from the G0690. Cripes. So, I called in and had my warranty case reopened, and I’ll get a call back Monday.

In the meantime, I figured I could install the old tube with two screws instead of the three that it uses and see if it would be stable enough to do some light cutting and get my DC cart going. Once I started turning allen keys I realized that I don’t have one mis-tapped hole on the old tube, I have two. Cripes again.

So today was spent drilling the new plate for my router table. That, at least, went well, and my router now has some much beefer 3/4” bolts holding it to the phenolic plate. Yay.

So not a total loss of the morning, but man Grizzly had better get it right this time.

Jessem router table with a Triton 3 1/4HP router. Since the router has an integrated lift, this table only has a Jessem plate, not one of the Jessem lifts. However, I did spring for the Mast-r-Fence, Mast-r-Top and the Paralign featherboards. All in all, it’s a really nice little system.

Having said that, since nothing is ever easy I did run in to a few problems.

First, I bought the top from a local dealer and it was old stock. No big deal, but the new phenolic tops have aluminum T-tracks as well as mitre slots. This older one just has a since T-slot routed directly into the phenolic. I hope it will hold up.

Second, this old top does not match the new ones for screw sizes. According to the manual, it should take M5×12mm screws for both screwing to the stand and screwing on the tracks for the fence, but this one is not tapped that way. It is close but very tight. So tight, I could not twist them all the way in with an allen key. I ended up having to put in three (!!!) M5 washers and torquing the screws down with a socket set. It’s not going anywhere, but it was an unexpected issue.

Finally, my last issue was with mounting the Triton router. The baseplate screws from Triton are very, very short, something like a quarter inch in length. As you can imagine that makes for very little leeway when drilling the plate. As it is, I had to countersink the screws 1/2” in the plate, and I don’t trust it to hold the weight. I should have bought longer screws but I didn’t think it through before firing up the drill press and going to town.

As such, I am now paranoid about the router breaking loose during operation and that scares the hell out of me. I fear the router more than anything else in my shop. I’m ordering a new insert and I’ll buy some longer screws.

Got the front rail on and went to install the front tube when I discovered a problem. One of the holes on the tube is not tapped correctly, and with very little effort I can slide the bolt right in and out. There is no chance it can be tightened.

I called Grizzly, got someone on the phone (CS is open on Saturday, yay!) spent about fifteen minutes explaining the details and providing my info, and they will ship a new tube on Monday! Very easy to deal with, took my account of the problem at face value, and never questioned anything I told them. I was very impressed. Hopefully the tube will get here within a few days.

In the meantime I can still do some test cuts with my mitre gauge so hopefully I will still get the saw fired up today. I need an extension cord to reach my 220 outlet and could only get locking connectors, so I’ll also need to snip off the Grizzly power cord end and install my own, so there is still some work to do, along with installing the rear rail and aligning the table to the blade. I might also have time to work on my router table.

Had a bit of a rough family day and ended up having a lot less time in the garage then I planned, so the saw is not assembled beyond the first extension table being installed. So far, so good! Machining is top notch, tables are dead flat, and assembly so far has been easy and well documented in the instructions.

There are pics. Therefore it happened.

The saw is current on it’s mobile base thanks to the help of three buddies last night. I only had a half hour or so to work on it today otherwise, so one of the extension tables is installed but that’s it.

I recently picked up a Oneway Multi-Gauge and I used it to help align the extension. Very, very cool little tool. I’m sure you could build one with wood and a dial indicator, but having the heft of the cast iron body is very handy. Using this, I’ve got the front of the table flush within a thou, and the tables are level within a thou as well. Very happy with the fit and finish of this saw so far, even though I’ve really only started to work with it.

Let me tell you, grabbing your drill, a large bit, and blindly drilling into an exterior wall is not my idea of fun. I took it slow, measured everything out as best as I could, and came in within a few inches of where I expected. I consider that a success. I just need the inspection to be done and then I will be uncrating my saw and firing it up. This weekend, hopefully!

In the meantime I am still awaiting news on my jointer which I took back to the dealer last week. They have had it for almost five days and if they haven’t squared it up yet, I’m just going to assume that they can’t and ask for my money back. What a disappointment!

I have my permit for the 220v wiring, so this weekend’s goal is to get the cable pulled and ready for inspection next week. Then I can get the new saw assembled, tuned and fired up!

Squaring the fence to the infeed table went swimmingly but to my alarm the fence was then out of square with the outfeed. I checked the fence with my trusty Lee Valley straightedge, and it was dead flat.

Dreading what I was going to find, I clamped the straightedge to the outfeed and grabbed my feeler gauges to check the tables for co-planar. To my dismay, the infeed was dipping in one corner by over 12 thou. This is not a parallelogram jointer so I didn’t have much option to try and fix it other than backing off the locking nuts on the gib screws and trying to finesse it a bit. Well, no dice, the infeed table is flat but it’s not co-planar to the outfield at all.

I got it as close as I can but after jointing two spare cutoffs of 2×4 you can easily see with the naked eye that you don’t end up with anything close to square. Sigh.

I’ll call my dealer on Tuesday and see what they can do for me. In the meantime, I’ll work on running the 220v for my 0690.

So, the goal this weekend was to clear off my ‘work table’ so that I had some assembly space for more tool hangers. You can see this table in the back right of my Day Zero picture You can see that it’s completely covered in wood, hand tools, flotsam, jetsam and other miscellaneous crud.

Job one was getting a better system for storing lumber:

These are from Busy Bee, and they come with two racks. I bought two sets since i know I will be supporting some longer boards, but I have to say getting all four level and on the same plane is nearly impossible. I’m going to need to come up with some shims, or something for the lower racks.

After this, it was a question of purging and organizing the rest of the table. Now it’s actually got some useable space:

Yeah, it’s just a piece of MDF with some brackets on the wall and some 2×6 legs, but for now it will do the job. A proper bench or assembly table is on next year’s list of projects.

The glue, drill, clamps, etc are out since I am currently using them to build more tool hangers, so the cleat wall is filling up. Here’s a few shots of how things are coming along;

All in all, there is a lot more space and less clutter, but still more to go. Oh one last shot, my new toy:

I’m still waiting for my jointer pal to show so I can set the knives, but so far, so good. The tables are in good shape and my new anti-rust regimen seems to be holding up well. These tables just went through a week of 30+ temps with 90%+ humidity and are still free of any sign of corrosion. Bostik TopCote + Paste Wax = Victory!

Finally getting a real saw! Now, of course, I need to get 220v to the garage.

Anyhow, the Jointer is assembled and dialled in. Looks pretty good right now and I know I’ll get a lot of good use out of it when I start making end-grain boards for Xmas this year. However, lacking a table saw at the moment, I wanted to work with the few pieces I did manage to cut before returning my Ridgid saw. They were not overly square, but this is for shop furniture so no big deal.

I was getting ready to assemble the pieces I had cut for my dust collector, and thought this would be great timing to get some practice in with my Dowelmax that I purchase to use for face frames and carcass construction. Well, I’d done a few test joints a while ago, but I let my familiarity get the better of me. I did the first batch of drilling just fine, and when I went to do the second, I just quickly eyeballed what I thought was the right faces. And I promptly screwed up.

Basically, the few pieces I had cut are now all drilled out completely incorrectly, and they are no longer able to be assembled.

Whoops.

I’m 99% sure I’ll be ordering a Grizzly 0690 but I have a 10% off coupon code that I can’t use until the 20th. As such, I haven’t even ordered my new saw yet.

Waiting SUCKS.

What triggered this whole event was detailed in this thread but the gist of it is that the blade slide out of alignment again, and now the belt is slipping or the motor is shot. I’m fed up with all the little annoyances and back it goes.

So, I’m shopping for saws again. I was trying to stay local but Grizzly has such great pricing, that I am leaning towards that. I still really want a SawStop but that is not going to happen with my budget this year. I do want a step up but I can’t come up with $3k right now.

So the saw that seems to be a great match for me is the 715P. It’s a hybrid but it’s got a lot going for it. My next option is the 0690, but it’s going to be really expensive to get up here to Canada…

Anyhow my back is better, I am table-saw-less for now, but I did get a deal on a new Jointer (Rikon 20-100) from a local shop, so I have something to work on until I choose a saw and it arrives here.