I'm using this (new to me) unisaw for making a house full of cabinets. I'm using paint grade 3/4" birch ply, which, is actually somewhere around 11.5/16ths thick, or some such screwy thickness.
To go fast on this task, I'm setting up my stacked dado blade to be a full 3/4" wide, (minus a sharpening or two on the blade), so the dados have a slight gap, and I position the gap where it will be least noticeable. Thank you, Mr. Caulk. Everything is getting painted.
To speed my job up even faster, for ease of measuring and laying out, I'm not cutting my dados 1/4" deep. I'm cutting them to leave 1/2" of ply behind the dado. This way, if a box is 35" wide, the tops and bottoms are 34" long. Simple to remember. While the dados will give some mechanical support, I am leveraging them more for a glue reservoir and a registration aid during assembly than anything. I am glueing and then screwing through the cabinet into the edge of the shelves and partitions.
So, I have an odd sided dado depth. I've gotten to the point that "so many cranks up, and stopping with the handle on the crank at 9 o'clock" is pretty much the right setting.
Did I mentioned I lubed up the trunnion really well when I got the saw? I did.
So I was cutting out a cabinet yesterday morning, and NOTHING was lining up right in my test mockup. I must have scratched my head for an hour and a half, and I went through MULTIPLE mock up assemblies, making sure I got this cabinet correct. Here's what it will look like: (rear view. Cubbies on the right are for wine bottles)
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As you can see, this is no slouch of a cabinet when it comes to its fair share of dados and internal members.
Anyway… after 3 mock ups, I noticed something with my dado depth that seemed off. While I knew I had set it up for something in the neighborhood of < 3/16", it was WAY too shallow. Turns out, my well lubed trunnion was lowering itself, all by itself, the more the saw ran.
I guess that's why they make those locking knobs in the middle of the crank handles. Duh. I've owned my powermatic 66 since '97 and never had to lock it once to maintain blade height. However, it seems with this '98 unisaw, you pretty much gotta lock it for even maintaining the regular saw blade height!
Lesson learned.
Tip: When setting a dado depth to leave 1/2" of material (instead of cutting 1/4" deep), take two pieces of scrap, dado them, and hold them back-to-back and measure the combined thickness of two pieces instead of one. Measure for 1". Here's an illustration.
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