lumberjoe,
You don’t have to measure this exactly on a tooth. You can measure this at the base of a gullet. On a 10 inch blade you can go a quarter inch from the gullet in towards the center. When the R4512 has this issue, you don’t need a dial indicator. It’s very pronounced. You can see the back edge of the saw blade moving left and right as you raise and lower the blade. And I’m talking just raising/lowering a tiny bit. If you put “up pressure” on the blade, mine shifted left at the back. As soon as I relieved that pressure and just barely started the blade going down, it shifted back to the right. Mine was well over a tenth of an inch. VERY visible to the naked eye. You don’t have to run the blade through anything like full travel. Just putting pressure on it in one direction or another will manifest the defect if it’s present. My runout was less than .002. Closer to .001. But every time I adjusted the blade up or down, the alignment with the miter slots would be off because somewhere in that mechanism for raising and lowering, there’s a twist in the casting…. may have happened after machining… and the entire casting that carries the arbor is pivoting.
So forget about being exactly on a tooth. The suggestion that you set a ruler against the back of the blade is just so you can see it moving easier.
Bring the blade up. Set a ruler against the right side of the blade disc as far to the back as you can without being on a specific tooth. Lower the blade about an eigth of an inch. If the back of the blade pulls away from that ruler, it’s an issue.Don’t even BOTHER trying to align it or check for runout. Runout won’t matter and you won’t be able to keep it aligned.
