First piece of woodworking equipment

[Mike Konobeck]

You will love the slider. Takes a bit to get used to but no going back for me now.

I used to think that the Forrest was the end all blade when I had a contractor saw so I naturally ordered up a Forrest 12" WWII for my combo before I actually had it setup and tried it out. On my old contractor saw it did most everything OK but never anything perfect with the exception of cross cutting. Ripping and ply were its biggest weaknesses. Ripping blades are MUCH more efficient at ripping (of course) but I just had no idea how great they are until I was struggling with some hard maple. Same goes for ply. Getting chipout on some prefinished maple ply for some cabinets and picked up a ply blade and eliminated 99% of the chipout.

Stick with high quality blades. Really can't go wrong. I would stay away from the Irwin line. Lots of options out there. Forrest makes all of the different style blades but as you can see everyone has their favorites.

Good luck setting up the saw and starting to make sawdust.

[Mats Bengtsson]

...The mostly appear to be thin kerf though... Should I be worried about blade stability? Grizzly offers a Forrest blade stabilizer that I could always get...

There are two advantages with thin blades: They do not demand as much power to cut through, and the loss of material is less. The advantage with a thicker blade is stability, and with stability comes a better cut.

Go with high quality blades, the vendor will see to that they are not too thin.

--- Mats ---

[Ryan Mooney]

One other blade manufacturer to consider is Tenryu. They seem to be comparable to the forest quality wise (into the niggling on details territory, I'd take either one ) and are generally a smidge cheaper (I ended up with some because they were a fair bit cheaper if you added in the special boring that the forest required for my saw whereas the tenryu offered it as one of the stock blade configs).

According to the shark guard website, the riving knife can (or should) be a smidge narrower than your kerf and makes somewhat compelling arguments in support of that.. I haven't seen many other well considered arguments on knife vs blade width (but would be interested if there are any ).

[Phil John]

Thanks for the feedback everyone - I'll let you know what I go for.

Next set of questions. I emailed Grizzly to find out about cords. They recommend an L6-30 plug. Anyone have any recommendations on the best place to buy a lead? If I am going to wire my garage, should I just use these receptacles? I'm thinking of getting a jointer/planer combo and bandsaw down the track, so I would like to install 3 or 4 outlets at once. If so, should I only run 10/2 (on my understanding the L6-30 only uses 2 hots and a ground)... instead of 10/3, or should I just cap the neutral in case I need to run a regular 240/250v receptacle down the track?

Anyone have a good recommendation on how long the lead should be for the 623x (mine will be sitting to the side of a 2 car garage - so not exactly that far away from the receptacle I will install)? Worst case scenario I'm going to set it up and work out the distance to the wall, but I was thinking of perhaps getting 15 feet and then trimming as necessary.

....once I am done I am going to post a review that includes all this info so the next guy like me knows exactly what he needs to do to get the saw working.