Combining old contractor saw with a slider

[Dan Schmidt]

I'll be replacing my Delta contractor saw with a Felder slider. Thinking about keeping the old saw and dedicating it to dado setup. Does anyone have experience (pictures??) in using a contractor saw on the outfeed side of a slider? Anything you can share (especially if you mated with a Felder K700S) would be golden. Attached is a semi-accurate scaled plan view of what this might look like, but not sure about the interferences I'd encounter (contractor saw motor, etc). Seemingly I could do this without losing any additional shop space given how I plan to position the saw(s) against a wall.
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[Jim Becker]

I put my router table setup in that position (poor man's shaper station :) ), so I don't see any reason why you can't do it with the North American design table saw to dedicate for your purpose. The trick will be fine tuning the height which for obvious reasons will need to be spot-on identical to the height of your new slider. Hopefully, your older saw's fence is completely removable, too.

[Bob Hoffmann]

I added a slider to my contractor saw years ago - been using it for about 15 years and with 3 moves, and it has only had minimal adjustments.

The slider was purchased in Germany, and it had to be adapted to the fit the saw -- you will notice a couple of aluminum plates that distribute the stress points ... it is also a lot smaller of a slider than what you have in your diagram.

One thing that I noticed was that you have it mounted on the same side as the ripping fence --seems like the wrong side t put it on. Also, you have it mounted with the extension table on the side -I would suggest that you mount it directly on the table - you really want it close to the blade ...

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[Rod Sheridan]

Hi Dan, will your Felder have dado capability?

I have a Hammer slider with dado capability and can't imagine not using it for dadoes as the sliding table is fantastic for that.

Regards, Rod.

[Dan Schmidt]

Bob, thanks for the photos. To clarify I'm not adding a slider mechanism to my contractor saw. I'm looking to use my contractor saw as an outfeed table of a full (fully entact) sliding table saw. In effect, I'll have 2 operational saws back to back.

Rod, yes - my Felder will be prepped for dado use. I confirmed with Forrest however that they can modify my main blades for Felder use, but not the Dado King. So, to use the slider would mean another stack purchase. The Felder hard tooling is sweet, but wow expensive. I also hate the job of swapping dado and main blades back and forth during a project - especially when I don't want to change the fence, setup, etc. So since I have the contractor saw already I'd like to give it a whirl....

[Jim Becker]

I think you're making a good decision to keep the other saw for dado use if you prefer to cut them that way. The expense to adapt for use on your Felder saw wouldn't be worth it to me, for sure. I can actually use a regular dado set on my MM slider (5/8" bore, nothing custom) with a modified insert, but I chose not to do that. I still do narrow grooves on the TS, but use the router table setup for wider grooves, including use of "plywood thickness" bits for good fit when that's appropriate. I'll also use a Festool router on a track for certain types of dado work where the table isn't best suited to do it.