Beginner # 9 Using the Sliding Mitre
- Details
- Hits: 9269
The first real dedicated workshop machinery was called a Radial Arm Saw, and many are still around today and I believe you can even by the larger industrial ones to this day. The radial arm saws worked fairly well, their only real problem was the number of digits they claimed ... that's digits as is fingers. Yes they were pretty unsafe despite efforts to make them safer, but their real safety issue was "walking" that's when the blade catches the wood and "walks" toward the operator, which of course happens in a millisecond and if you happen to be holding the board in the path of the blade, you will get hurt. There is no way you can hold back that mechanism. I owned and operated one of these saw for many year and treated it like it was out to get me, which it never did. Then one day it died and it gave me an excuse to finally go out a purchase a nice sliding mitre saw.
In truth I had been looking at them for a whiles, so when the time came to get one, I only had to select a current model and the dealer I was going to purchase it from.
I had agonized for months about whether or not to get a 12" or a 10" sliding mitre. And then along came the reticulated models and it was an even harder choice to make because they took up less space in my rather small workshop ...