What To Do With Table Saw I’m Getting Ready to Replace
Fr_Jude
| Posted in Power Tools and Machinery on
Any ideas about what to do with my 12-year old Rigid TS3650 which I am ready to replace. It has been a great starter saw, but it is starting to show its age. It has an after-market fence – Vega. I got the Bench Dog extension wing for a Jessem manual router lift. But recently I somehow managed to mess up the left-tilt feature, so the blade is now fixed at 90 degrees. If I had the room, I would definitely keep it, but I don’t so I’m open to any suggestions about what to do with it.
Replies
Some interesting possibilites! - I had fun thinking it through.
If you can fix it, then sell it and buy something you want.
Otherwise, I would remove the motor and NVR switch and use that for a home-made something else. For me it would be a big disc sander, or possibly a drum sander. I presume you would have room for something useful and neither of these are larger than the original item.
The fence would make a great addition to a router table, especially if you can calibrate it to dead centre on the bit.
Keep the lower frame to support your whatever you make from the motor.
Make a nice workshop clock out of the old blade.
It has a cool handle which just says steampunk gatling gun to me, but then I've an odd sense of taste.
The table itself should be nice and flat so I'd inset that into a worktop to use for small projects that need to be dead flat, but you don't want to risk damaging your decent saw.
The rest is just scrap really though of course you can make all sorts of things out of sheet steel with a jigsaw and a file. You can even polish the perspex guard to use for other projects, though that is probably a step beyond being good value.
Have fun!
Take off the wings, put a dado blade on it, and attach it to your new saw as a dedicated dado station/ table extension.
I have a Rockler and Woodcraft store near where I live. They have bulletin boards where you can put things for sale or free. From what you say, it sounds like it might be worth offering for free on such a bulletin board and explaining what it can't do. For many, a 90 degree cut would be fine.
Habitat for Humanity Restore donation.
Thanks, all. Excellent suggestions. I'm not ready quite yet to pull the trigger, but I'm liking the repurposing ideas - maybe a dedicated router table, minus the motor and the right wing extension. I also have a Woodcraft store in the area, so I'll check that, too.
This was a no-brainer for me. I have a 40 year old 10” direct drive Craftsman that I already had a double-sided sanding disk for. I removed the wings and now it’s a semi-dedicated disk sander with two different grits, a tilt-able, variable height disk, and with the disk cranked down it can be used as an outfeed table or a base for other bench top tools such as grinders, small bandsaws or scroll
saws or whatever.
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