Table Saw Vibration

[Harvey Pascoe]

Just a heads up here. This topic appears occasionally, and as I recall most respondents point to the arbor bearings whenever saw vibration is encountered. My Unisaw, 16 years old, started a vibration a year ago that progressively got worse, so I checked runout on arbor and was fine. The drive belts can't be seen from above but one day when I was cleaning sticks and slivers out of the base I noticed the belts were badly cracked, all three of them. Started the saw and watched the belts and holy smoke, no wonder it was vibrating, they were doing the watusi. After replacing the belts the saw now purrs with zero vibration.

Just in case anyone else was given the same bad advice I was, I was told many years ago by an old timer that one should never grease the mechanism in the saw because the grease will collect saw dust, gum up the works and eventually prevent the range of motion. As a respecter of machinery, I eventually could no longer stand the shriek of metal on metal every time I turned a crank and so got out the tube of lithium grease and slathered it on. WOW! What a difference as this saw operates like brand new.

The fallacy of that advice is that it would be a whole lot easier, and cheaper, to brush away grease gummed up with sawdust than it would be to live with, or replace a worn out saw due to a lack of lubrication. BTW, the Delta manual is totally silent on the subject of lubrication.

[Chris Fournier]

I experienced the same thing with my cabinet saw years ago, a crack in one of the two belts. Our TS belts have a hard life as the radius of the pullies that they work with is pretty small. A "poly v belt" makes a great difference but they are a bit more expensive.

As far as lubricating goes I've avoided grease and gone the dry film lube route; spray graphite or teflon. I prefer the graphite because you can see the wear - black vs bare metal. I think that the grease would require less maintenance as I find that the spray films need pretty frequent touching up.

It is amazing how much you can "fix" your equipment with some dead basic common sense maintenance!

If damaged bearings were causing vibration I'd have to say that they would have been kicking up a huge fuss for quite some time.