.
This will give you some idea of the size of the table saw. The portable circular saw is fastened to the underside of the top and controlled by a switch attached to the forward edge of the table. The switch and the saw can be removed, giving you a table roughly 2 x 4 feet. Or the table may be placed across saw-horses and used as a regular table saw.
If you wish to have a pedestal -- I recommend it -- you will need to make something similar to what is shown in the following illustration. The pedestal is designed to fit into recesses left in the under-side of the table. Shelves in the pedestal are meant to be stacked with bricks so as to increase the mass of the table, which may be fitted with rubber feet to give it a better grip on a smooth-surfaced floor. An upper shelf is designed to catch saw dust and expel it to the rear.
I made the pedistal (and the table-top) out of the cheapest material I could find -- 1/4" plywood for the pedistal and 1/2" plywood for the top. The thickness of the table-top edge was built-up to 3/4" by gluing on 1-1/2" x 1/4" plaster lath. The pedestal was stiffened by adding 1x2" furring strips.
Although the design looks a bit much, once the principle is understood it goes together rather quickly. Glue was TiteBond III, Weldwood 'Plastic Resin' and Gorilla Glue urethane. Although I tried to keep things square & accurate, I was more interested in knocking the thing together in a hurry. That meant I would need to adjust the squareness of the saw-blade to the table. To accommodate that task I left things a bit loose with regar to the saw so that once everything was assembled I could bed the saw in Bondo or even glue (after waxing the shoe), tap it into alignment with the fence & miter groove then tighten down the saw. Or whatever.
The principle here is quite simple: we've merely attached a portable saw to a table-top surface so as to increase the accuracy and utility of the saw, which will allow us to make the long rip-cuts needed to produce longerons, spar booms and rib sticks. With that in mind, the saw goes together using deck screws making it easily dismantled and stored when not in use.
However, anything worth building is worth doing well, hence the varnish and so forth.
I'll show more of the details in another posting, as well as some samples of the cuts it can make.
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Show & Tell
Wow! I barely got this article loaded before you were knocking on the door (veeduber@chuggers.net) Yes, there will be drawings but it really is a fairly simple project. And yes, it's definitely over-kill if for most Americans, who can probably buy a used table saw for about what it would cost to build this one. But that overlooks two advantages of this project:
1. -- The saw can be assembled or disassembled in a matter of minutes and may be stored under a bed or hung from a sturdy peg on a wall.
2. -- This article with its drawings and photos provides a concept that may be new to you if you haven't grown up with tools and with using them as an every-day part of your life.
(Dear Raj, I assume you are living in an apartment house. ) The fact this table saw can be dismantled and stowed away, is a feature of interest even to those who can afford a small table saw.
-R.S.Hoover
-R.S.Hoover
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