December 5, 2011

Radial Saws and Oak

I had a hankering for a large sized radial arm saw, and some wide white oak. Oregon here i come.



A 16" Dewalt GE radial arm saw popped up on my radar, meticulously restored by the previous owner Doug Westlind. If the Yates snowflake isn't an indication, his shop is amazing, stocked with every dream machine i could ever want. I wish i had more time, but road trips of this nature are a series of time accumulating choices. So it was off to the next stop to get some wide Oregon white Oak planks.



The 2000km and 39 hour trip went well, a lot of driving but sometimes when you need something travel is a necessity.



Here's the Dewalt safe and sound at its new home needing a table and a confident operator; it's a very intimidating type of saw. But it'll be nice to have a trusty crosscut saw, my Makita mitre was never used for finish cuts and it's capacity is now dwarfed.

-Tyler

6 comments:

  1. Wow! That saw is a whopper. I wouldn't turn my back on it!

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  2. Apparently this model had an option of a 20" blade guard. Yikes.

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  3. I worked at a shop in Savannah, GA that had one of these. It needed some work and thankfully i was allowed to give it a pretty thorough restoration. Amazing tool when dialed in. Yes, it can be intimidating. Don't ever trust anything it tells you.

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  4. oh yeah.
    lucky man to have a saw that big, and a big enough shop to put it in.

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  5. I could see dialing it in being very time consuming, but every axis has locking micro adjustments, and tapered zero stops. I think it'll hold its accuracy very well. Also the carriage movement is silky, running on 8 bearings and pristine ways.

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  6. Jbreau, It's going to reside in my original small shop. I'm going to be cutting wood in there for a stint, now that i have some of my larger projects complete. Surprisingly i don't think it uses more space then my Makita. If anything it creates more usable bench space when you swing the arm 90 degrees.

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