Sawstop blade height adjustment

[Jim Eisenstein]

Wondering about the blade height adjustment on my SawStop 3hp PCS. I find
it to be surprisingly crude. Even when moving the blade in one
direction (to avoid backlash), the blade does not respond in a smooth continuous
manner in response to small incremental rotations of the hand wheel. Some small
rotations produce no change in the blade height while others do. For sneaking up on the
fit of a tenon say, this is a real pain. I've resorted to using a dial indicator to
judge whether and how much the blade moves in response to an small turn of the wheel.

I'm not expecting 0.001" precision, or even 0.005", but I'd have thought the adjustment
would at least be smooth and continuous. Interested to hear others opinions/experiences.

[Paul F Franklin]

I can't say I've seen what you describe on mine. There's some backlash, sure, but I've not seen the other things you describe. FWIW, I recently did a thorough cleaning and lubing of my PCS following the video on the SS website, and it made a big difference in the ease of height/tilt adjustment and smoothness. There was quite a bit of sawdust caked on the racks and pinions and gears that do the movement (since they are greased, they do build up the dust). I could see that leading to what you describe, so if you haven't tried a good cleaning, give it a shot. The SS video is excellent.

[Aaron Rosenthal]

There’s 2 things I do as winter sets in locally. (Vancouver Canada)
I bring into my basement all my hand planes foe disassembly/cleanup, and see to cleaning and winterizing my stationary tools. That includes cleaning and setting up mgy SawStop PCS.
Im willing to bet you need a thorough cleaning “by the book” of your saw and your problems will be corrected.
IF you’ve done all that already, my suggestion is to contact SawStop and work with the technician to correct your issue. They’re incredibly helpful.

[Jim Eisenstein]

Thanks Paul and Aaron!

[Jim Becker]

The 3hp PCS I had in my temporary shop for about 9 months was smooth as glass with blade height adjustment. It was super easy to tweak things "just a hair" whenever I needed to. It sounds like something is amiss if yours does not perform that way. It could be as simple as some "gunk" being in the wrong place or something actually not working properly.

[Jim Eisenstein]

Thanks, Jim. I'm going to do a thorough cleaning and see if that helps. It's puzzling, I agree. Aside from this, the PCS has been excellent.

[Jim Becker]

Jim, I mentioned the cleaning because over the years, there have been enough instances of folks mentioning issues with blade raise and blade tilt where debris came into play, especially for the tilt because most folks rarely use that feature so it "collects" stuff. Now if you thoroughly clean things up and you still have issues moving smoothing and have excessive backlash...something else is amiss.

[Jim Eisenstein]

Hi Jim, I went through the sawstop cleaning procedure and yes, indeed, there was a lot of gunk on all
the relevant gears, etc. Cleaning them up was a lot more fun than watching election returns!
In any case, the cleaning greatly improved the blade lift performance. Thanks to you and the
others for the tip.

[Roger Feeley]

Sonce my Sawstop blade rises straight up and down, putting a DRO on the blade height is still on my wish list. I was kind of hoping someone else would blaze the trail for me.