does anyone know what this is

[keith micinski]

I found this saw on craiglsist and can't seem to find anything out about it under the information they gave. What is it and what does it do exactly?
http://southbend.craigslist.org/tls/4295979857.html

[Dennis McDonaugh]

I don't know, but at $500 its cheap by the pound.

[Pat Barry]

I believe I've seen similar horizontal band saws used for cutting plastic foam material. Probably not much good for harder materials

[Ethan Melad]

looks like a beam saw to me. i haven't used one myself, but seen them operated - they can crosscut/rip multiple sheets at a time so as to ensure all parts are cut to the same size. some have a large enough throat/blade to crosscut large beams. i could be wrong, though, since this one is manually operated mage its something different?

heres a video of a big CNC beam cutter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-gesOxJQiQ

[Bill Huber]

Could it be a panel saw, looking around on the net, it looks like some panels saws I have seen.

It would be a lot of work to get it out but the cost is right and if nothing else you could scrap it out for I am sure more then $500.

[pat warner]

Gantry saw, for big panels, plastic, aluminum on occasion, will eat MDF.
A marvelous invention.

[keith micinski]

Ok , I'll will do some more research on this. Does anyone think I can use it to cut plywood sheet goods and maybe glued up panels or table tops?

[keith micinski]

Ok I see now it is a almost like a Cnc machine for gang ripping operation of panels. Let's hope it has a bunch of major issues and doesn't work because I have no idea how that fits into my work flow or my shop for that matter but if it functions anything like that saw in the video I want it.

[johnny means]

Horizontal beam saw. You stick in a stack of sheet goods, typically flakeboard, MDF, melamine etc. Push them up against a fence in the back. The fence then pushes the stack up some predetermined distance. A circular saw blade then travels down the beam, cutting your sheets. Blade returns to park position and fence advances stack of sheets another predetermined distance. Saw blade makes another cut. This goes on until the sheets are advanced all the way through to the front where the operator offloads the cut parts. My first job in the field was operating one of these for a countertop shop. I could easily rip 40 sheets of 3/4" flake into decks, buildup and backsplash material in less than one hour.

[johnny means]

Unless your feeding material to 20 fabricators, this thing would be ridiculous.

[Keith Weber]

Yup, beam saw. Like a sliding table saw, but the blade moves instead of the table.

[Harvey Melvin Richards]

I did plastic fabrication work for a while and the shop had a beam saw similar to that. It had a blade that was 30 or 36" in diameter. It worked great on 1" polypropylene.

[Jim Matthews]

Unless you're in a production environment,
looking at this indicates your shop space
is too large. Better money would be made
selling extra space for covered storage of boats,
vintage cars or stuffed animals.

[Jerome Stanek]

And most likely 3phase like ours at work is. they take up a lot of room for what you get. And ours use a 16 inch blade.

[Kent A Bathurst]

It is a panel saw. You load a stack of plywood, or other panels, on it and they get moved under the saw, and cut to length.

Dunno exactly for htis saw, but maybe 5" +/- is the stack height - depends on the blade diameter, of course.

Typically, you enter multiple cuts into the controller, hit GO, and it indexes, cuts, indexes, cuts.......

THen, often the guy on the back will rotate the stacks, push them back to the infeed side, so they can go again - taking, say 18" x 96" stacks back to 43" x 18" stacks - just an example I made up.

Not sure what you do, but this would be in the top 5 on my list of "The LAST woodworking machine I would ever need in my home shop".

4-head 52" wide belt sander sits atop that same list. You get my drift.................