Anybody esle this obsessive about runout?

Does that give you a wiggly cut?

-- "some old things are lovely, warm still with life ... of the forgotten men who made them." - D.H. Lawrence Wake Up America!! Please read; http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/26-0

“Does that give you a wiggly cut?”

I’ll assume you are not being snarky. The reason I measured the arbor runout to start with is because I could see saw marks on the cut. Not much but I could see them. Now its really hard to see any marks at all even in oak endgrain.

So you fixed it by coordinating blade wobble + with arbor run out – and vice versa?

-- "some old things are lovely, warm still with life ... of the forgotten men who made them." - D.H. Lawrence Wake Up America!! Please read; http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/26-0

It’s okay because wood MOVES.
:)

I work in vascular surgery and our tolerances with carotid stenosis or aortic aneurysm stents are not that tight.
Because the body moves. too

YMMV.

-- Todd http://www.PictureTrail.com/gid6255915

Wow I can only wish to understand what the hell u just explained but sounds pretty complicated to do while in tha midst of a project, I don’t even like changeing blades when I do rip,crosscut,and change materials from wood to acrylic but anyway I wish u lived near me to set up my tools. Lol!

-- Ike, Big Daddies Woodshop, http://www.icombadaniels@yahoo.com

“So you fixed it by coordinating blade wobble + with arbor run out – and vice versa?”

Yes, vice versa so that they cancel one another.

Actually… pretty ingenious solution. Not sure it’s one I’ll have time for soon, but also could be one of those things that takes longer to explain how to do than to actually do. :)

“It’s okay because wood MOVES”

I’m not arguing for those tolerances for wood cut dimensions, only for machine set up.
Less runout = less sanding/scraping.
Cheers,
Jim

I can’t see fussing over such small amounts as being a useful exercise. Odds are there are other factors that are having more effect. Maybe not all teeth on the blade have exactly the same set, maybe the blade flexes under load, maybe the fence isn’t perfectly parallel to the blade . . .

-- Dwight - "Free legal advice available - contact Dewey, Cheetam & Howe""

^ What Monte said.

-- He who dies with the most tools... dies with the emptiest wallet.

Interesting responses from MonteCristo and NiteWalker.
Question: When you guys set your jointer knives, do you do your best to get them set at the same height and parallel to the table or do you just sort of eyeball them? I know I’m on one end of the tool set up obsessiveness scale and am curious just how far I am away from the other extreme.

Jointers are a different animal; though setup methods vary greatly.
I prefer to keep things as simple as possible so I’m not chasing .0001”.
For a jointer I like John WHite’s method of a small stick with magnets glued to it.

For a tablesaw, I’ve never checked my arbor for runout as there was never enough of a reason to; my cuts are clean with a sharp blade. I aligned the blade to the miter slot using a dial indicator on a piece of wood that rides in the miter slot. I’m within .0015, which is great for woodworking.

There’s nothing wrong with precision; setting up your tools for precise operation means there’s less unpredictably in use. The real indicator of precision is how your cuts turn out. If you feel and see that cuts are better after the steps you’ve taken, then I’d consider it time well spent. There’s just a lot of variables involved though.

-- He who dies with the most tools... dies with the emptiest wallet.

Well said NiteWalker. Sounds like we’re not so different after all.

RipFence,

I also found MonteCristo and NiteWalker responses to be interesting. I don’t think they were trying to be snarky or putting anyone down, but just making a good point. Nothing wrong with spending that much time with each set-up as long as your happy with the end result.

I’ve made my living for the past twenty five years doing custom woodworking, so I’ve had to decide how much time I should be taking for tool set-up and tune up. Yes, when I put a new set of planer knives in my machine, I spend a lot of time making sure everything is set at the same height and parallel to the table, so when I walk up to that machine I know it’s good to go. I make sure all my tools are sharp and well maintained, but I do have a limit to how much time I can spend on each set-up. To give you an example; I have one router set-up just for doing dovetails and nothing else. I took hours to set that router up to get the exact cut I wanted, so I leave it and that’s all that router gets used for. With a shop labor rate @ $50/hr. you can see that I can’t afford to spend an hour or so just to set my router up every time I want to dovetail a drawer. (BTW , I probably dovetail 50 to 100 drawers a year). So I guess you could say I’m somewhere in the middle. I have a 5hp Powermatic Model 66 with a 52” fence and I always use a good quality blade designed for the type cutting I’m doing. I’ve always spent more time in making sure my blade is 90 degrees to the table and my fence is accurate. I’ve never checked the run out on my saw. Oops. lol.

-- John @ http://www.thehuffordfurnituregroup.com

I agree with all of the above, ie. it’s nice to reduce something like runout as much as possible but overdoing it can burn up a lot of time. As huff points out, making sure a few critical things (like your blade being square to the table) are right will end up paying a lot more dividends than messing with stuff you can’t fully measure.

-- Dwight - "Free legal advice available - contact Dewey, Cheetam & Howe""