Relief is at Hand
November 28th, 2008Long-Awaited Tool Purchase
I’m beside myself with excitement. The miter saw I wanted to buy is on sale! In a BIG way! Home Depot knocked $200 off the price!
A year or two ago I got myself a 10″ compound miter saw, and I felt like a big deal. But I was actually an idiot. Because I did not realize that a 10″ saw that doesn’t slide will not cut anything wider than about six inches. It’s great for tiny jobs. For large pieces of wood, it is utterly useless. You have to flip them over and cut from the other side, and then you get errors because the blade is out of alignment by a fraction of a millimeter. I have it very square, but it’s not perfect.
Since buying this thing, I have been amazed to learn how many jobs it WON’T do. It’s a great saw, but too small is too small.
A 12″ sliding saw will cut 13.5″ across a board. You can go right through a four-by-four with it, too.
Now I have to figure out what to put it on. Very confusing. There are a bunch of good stands out there. Ryobi makes a beauty, believe it or not. It’s also sold under the Denali brand. But hold on! It’s too small for 12″ sliding saws. So are a lot of the others.
Ridgid makes one, but it’s gigantic and heavy, and the legs that hold up the support things at the ends of the stand are no good. Bosch makes a great one, but it’s $279. Delta makes a nice one, but you have to attach your saw permanently. I’m not sure if that bothers me or not.
I guess I could flop it onto the Workmate and use two freestanding support doodads. Whatever they’re called.
This saw would be perfect for deck problems and so on.
Maybe the answer is to buy the Delta stand and leave it set up in the garage. A miter saw is extremely handy, but only if it’s always ready to use.
I don’t know what to do with the old saw. Buying it was a mistake. Craigslist, maybe.
I have been considering turning my old melamine desk into a router table. If I do that, I can put the miter saw on it and use add-on supports. The router is under the table, and the miter saw would be above it, so there would be no conflict.
Dust removal will be challenging. Maybe I should just put a big fan beside the table, to blow sawdust out into the driveway. I’ve noticed that no matter how much sawdust I blow out there, it disappears in a day or two. And I can pretend it’s mulch.
November 28th, 2008 at 4:49 PM
I’m looking for the same thing… What make and model did you find? I’m hoping I could check on the same thing at my Home Depot out here in the Northern Rockies!!!
November 28th, 2008 at 4:49 PM
It’s online-only. The big Ridgid.
November 28th, 2008 at 10:22 PM
Why don’t you (whisper it) build something? You have all those tools…
Regards,
Ric
November 29th, 2008 at 8:32 AM
Although I use my tools all the time, I have been stalling on things a big miter saw would be helpful with. I need to make a small cabinet to match the big one I made for the patio, and there are some outdoor doors that need to be redone because the contractor was inept.
My sister wants a shed, but the ones at the lumber stores are either too big or too expensive, and they’re not very good for what you pay.
I could do this stuff with the table saw, but I am not all that eager to try to cut six-foot-long boards off evenly, given the inherent wobbliness.
I’m not using the circular saw for this. I’m just not.
November 29th, 2008 at 8:07 PM
Hey Steve I dont know if you will have any intrest in this idea or not. I thought I would offer it.
My friend James has taught me alot about wood working, and we help each with projects. When we built the shelves in his garage at his new house, we cut out and boxed in a drop area for his miter saw so that the cutting surface was level with the shelf top. We made a wooden cover with a finger hole to pull it up for when the saw was not in use, but when you want to use it one person can cut 10ft boards easily by themselves. You can also clamp a stop block to the bench and feed from the other side to get as many pieces exactly the same size as you want. It makes life easy and I thought it may be of some help to you. I did not think of it, I dont know who showed it to him. He built cabinets in TX before he moved to KY and we used to work toghther.
The other thing he taught me, when I would decide something was good enough, he told me that it is not. Its not how good of a job I do compared to the best others can do, its how good of a job I do compared to the best I can do.
It would help you, and make it easier for you to make better cuts, and more repeatable cuts and will allow you to still use your bench for other work as well.