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Thread: Mobile Delta Unisaw/Shaper Combo

  1. #16
    Just an update, I got my cam latches for the Uniguard all installed, well all but one, they shorted me when I ordered, wasn't how I thought they were going to be though. I was thinking they were going to be facing up and towards the back but they were kind of in the way of being able to push an outfeed table flush against the back so I flipped them around. Not as showy offy this way but actually more functional really. So flip the levers down and the Uniguard flips down. Levers are from Kipp and are red powder coated cast aluminum, very nice pieces.

    Oh should mention the levers are screwed into a press fit captive nut so there is nothing to spin, installed them with lock-tite blue because it's what I had on hand, but need to order some red, or dimple a distortion into the end of the thread.

    How I thought they were going to be:


    How They ended up being:


    From the back:


    From underneath:
    Attached Images Attached Images
    Last edited by Ken A Irwin; 05-04-2020 at 12:00 PM.

  2. #17
    I also ended up slotting the holes in the front of the Unisaw top and drilling 2 holes in the front of the shaper top so that the Unifence front rail is solidly mounted all the way across everything in the front. So between the Uniguard in the back and the Unifence in the front all the iron has some extra mechanical support all the way across. The only think that isn't "locked in" is the Unisaw top from the back which would have just been a whole can of worms to do as the cabinet frame is in the way to be able to mount a bracket there. I would have had to pretty much taken the the whole saw apart and notch the cabinet and even then it would have been very difficult to assemble. I do still have to cut 5/8" off the Unifence rail so everything is flush and can clear a slider on either side.

  3. #18
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    Where did you find the 12" wings? I was not aware of them. Nice that they have square edges.

    I have often thought that a smaller version of what you have made, with a simple wing between the two machines would be very nice, but never did it because I only had the standard 8" wings with the rounded edges, and that would have not been the same.

    Beautiful job, especially getting all that top to look like one piece.
    Rick Potter

    DIY journeyman,
    FWW wannabe.
    AKA Village Idiot.

  4. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by Rick Potter View Post
    Where did you find the 12" wings? I was not aware of them. Nice that they have square edges.

    I have often thought that a smaller version of what you have made, with a simple wing between the two machines would be very nice, but never did it because I only had the standard 8" wings with the rounded edges, and that would have not been the same.

    Beautiful job, especially getting all that top to look like one piece.
    There is actually 2 different size wings used (2) 12" wings and (2) 8.25" wings. The former being standard Sawstop Professional/Contractor saw wings and the latter, also a Sawstop part, being a special spacer wing they sell as an accessory to their router table extension. So the way it's set up from left to right is 8.25" spacer wing -> 20" Unisaw -> 12" Extension wing -> 12" Extension -> 8.25" spacer wing -> 20" Shaper, for a total of 80.5" wide. The wings that bolt directly to the Delta tables needed to be redrilled. This maintains about 51.5" of rip capacity on the Unisaw. BTW, the 12" extensions run $135 each and the 8.25" inserts run $160, which both seemed pretty reasonable to me for a big slab of grey iron.

    I am also thinking I may do an all iron topped outfeed/assembly table at some point using more of the same pieces, still thinking that part out.

    Plan is also to put a sliding table on both sides. I've flipped back and forth between using either the Grizzly or the Sawstop slider (which are really variations of essentially the same design) but I think I'm pretty settled on the Grizzly at this point. The Sawstop slider looks all high tech out of the box with it's black anodized extrusions, some of the extrusions are more generously cut, and the fence seems a bit more refined, but capacities are basically the same either way. The Grizzly is quite a bit cheaper, replacement parts are cheaper if I decide to buy some parts to hack aspects of the slider, and well frankly I just think the clear anodized tables of the Grizzly just go with what I built more so than the black ones. In the end the Sawstop anodizing, is pretty and all, but having looked at a few that have had some use, doesn't really seem to hold up all that well, and look like they'd look beat up pretty fast. On the other hand the red anodizing of the cross cut fence on the Grizzly is a little cheap looking to be quite honest. I am not sure though I'd even use the cross cut fence either way, I may just adapt a Delta sliding miter jig I have and modify it to use the same Peachtree Uni-T Unifence fence rail you see in the pictures, might require some CNC routed aluminum pieces to make it work, but that's the next thing I plan to do anyway, so it'd be a fun project. So, then both the rip and crosscut fences would be basically the same extrusions and that Peachtree rail is some pretty heavy duty stuff with provisions for replaceable sacrificial wear surfaces that can also be used to adapt it further with some readily available 8020 pieces. This would let me cut to the center of a 4'x8' sheet in any direction by just about any method, fully supported, and I would be able to have specific and adaptable setups for different things by using a bunch of interchangeable extrusions.

  5. #20
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    Ken,

    It's official. I am an idiot. After posting my last, I went out to the shop and right in front of me was my SawStop PCS with the 12" wings. Duh. Sorry about that.

    The reason I never pursued tying a shaper to my Unisaw, before the SS came on the market, was because It was a right tilt, and the right side door access to the motor area would never be able to open enough. Even if the 12" was available at that time it still wouldn't have been enough. Looking now at the SS with left tilt, it would work great.

    I bought the Uni new in the early 90's and will keep it forever, even though it is now #3 and not used that much except for dado's and heavy ripping.

    Keep up the good work, it is interesting to see what people with talent and imagination can come up with.

    RP

    Have you considered a Jessem slider? They are not large, but they are nicely engineered. I still have one on my Unisaw. I have also used the large, and then the small Excalibur sliders. I had the legs on those bolted to the floor, and really liked them, especially the smaller one. They were solid and accurate in my shop.

    I changed out to the Jessem when we moved and I needed the saw moveable.
    Rick Potter

    DIY journeyman,
    FWW wannabe.
    AKA Village Idiot.

  6. #21
    Quote Originally Posted by Rick Potter View Post
    Ken,

    It's official. I am an idiot. After posting my last, I went out to the shop and right in front of me was my SawStop PCS with the 12" wings. Duh. Sorry about that.

    The reason I never pursued tying a shaper to my Unisaw, before the SS came on the market, was because It was a right tilt, and the right side door access to the motor area would never be able to open enough. Even if the 12" was available at that time it still wouldn't have been enough. Looking now at the SS with left tilt, it would work great.

    I bought the Uni new in the early 90's and will keep it forever, even though it is now #3 and not used that much except for dado's and heavy ripping.

    Keep up the good work, it is interesting to see what people with talent and imagination can come up with.

    RP

    Have you considered a Jessem slider? They are not large, but they are nicely engineered. I still have one on my Unisaw. I have also used the large, and then the small Excalibur sliders. I had the legs on those bolted to the floor, and really liked them, especially the smaller one. They were solid and accurate in my shop.

    I changed out to the Jessem when we moved and I needed the saw moveable.
    You're not an idiot, I personally think it's an amazing coincidence that the Sawstop extensions are so adaptable to the Delta. I mean as proprietary as most of the Sawstop stuff is, often annoyingly tweaked products from other manufactures changed just enough to make them difficult to adapt. And of course they don't just bolt up, you have to redrill them, and sorry to say but while the castings themselves are nice quality the hardware that comes with them is total garbage. I mean it's a Delta I am putting this on so I wouldn't use the metric screws anyway, just to reduce the tool count required, but 6mm, junk quality, screws to hold up a cantilevered slab of cast iron?

    As far as the motor access door, well yea even in my application it's a problem, when you put a Uniguard on, with the supplied hardware, you can no longer open the door. I am going to put a Duraham Manufacturing small parts box drawer slide frame into the space between the saw and the shaper to store the bits and bobs of the 2 machines (I will post pics of this when I do), which will need to removed and then the whole motor access cover removed, including the hinge for access. Big pain in the ass but really how often do you need to do that? On the early Unisaws it was a very convenient thing to do at all when it was a giant cast iron goose egg bolted to the side, get into the later post Rockwell saws with the hinged swinging covers and comprising that easy access seems like you are adding some huge limitation when it's really something that was not so easy to service for more than half the designs lifespan.

    So as far as sliders I've looked at all of them, past and present, and just to get it out of the way, unfortunately the JessEm slider is past, not present, they stopped making it. I also don't think the JessEm can rip a sheet either, which I'd kinda like to be able to do. The Excalibur (now Excelsior I think, and also sold as Sawstops "large" sliding table and I think there is a Powermatic variation) has just a massive static footprint, about as big as my whole machine and really now way to effectively make it mobile, it's not so much an extension of your saw as it is an independent tool that sits next to it and they are adjusted to work together. And remember I am looking to put a slider on both sides, preferably with some common jig interchangeability, to do this with that slider would be mind mindbogglingly huge. I do however like that it can be used with either the fence forward or back, and this is something I will try and incorporate into what ever I do end up doing in the end.

    The Delta sliding table was kinda cool but then cheaped out with the MDF top, but pretty much non-existant used, long since discontinued, oh and also couldn't do a full sheet. I thought that perhaps if I found one (and later 2) I'd try and see if I could adapt yet another Sawstop cast iron wing as a replacement table. It uses a round bar mounted to the Unisaw (or shaper) cabinet as a guide and support so it's effectively zero foot print.

    Perhaps my favorite design is the Dewalt DW7461 though the only way it seems I could actually get one would be to buy a DW746 saw that happens to have this accessory on it, harvest the slider and resell the saw. I've seen the Dewalt adapted to a Unisaw and it seems to compliment it well, although again can't do a full sheet and while it has what seems like a nice iron table, the fence is basically a repackaged Osborne EB-3, nice as a miter gauge but a bit light duty as the basis of a slider. The Dewalt is also a zero footprint design.

    There's also the 2 different all cast iron outrigger ones from Robland (discontinued) and Woodtek apparently still available though I've scoured the internet for some evidence that someone somewhere has used either one and found nothing. There was also both a Grizzly and a Jet add on iron outrigger slider at some point, but again info is pretty non-existant, and finding the? good luck.

    Trying to find a slider used is virtually impossible, let alone 2 of the same, so it really needs to probably be something available new and honestly I doubt I would buy anything used that wasn't cast iron anyway. Cast iron I can clean up, banged up Aluminum extrusions that can't be replaced are just too much of a crap shoot, like the main table extrusion for the Sawstop slider as a replacement part costs 3/4s of what the whole slider costs new (the same piece from Grizzly, is half that, still obscene but half). Anyway I want this to be a 2020 project not a 2020s project so used is probably out. Oh and the Sawstop/Grizzly slider is or has been sold by Jet, King, and Laguna with some styling/function variations, so it and the (impractical for my use) Excalibur (etc..) are really the only 2 with any kind of hope of serviceability though I am not sure how important that really is, since they'll likely both be long gone by the time I'd ever need it.

    It's all changed and will again, the Unisaw, the Delta contractor saw, the PM66, the General 350 are all gone, regulated out of existence by lawsuits from Sawstop because when he tried to sell his tech to them they laughed at him. So he lobbied to get table saws regulated for safety, didn't force them to use his tech but it did require them all to adapt to riving knife designs which basically meant all the old mainstays all became illegal to sell as new machines, and all those new designs? Well they all got shipped overseas, because why wouldn't they. The Sawstop patents are nearing their end and Sawstop has already been trying to get in some licensing deals before they do with some of the European manufactures. So yea it's all gonna change, and probably pretty good timing as I think Sawstop is probably pretty close to it's saturation point at least for it's cabinet saws.

    Anyway, I've tried to think of everything I can that you do on these machines that is risky and make that less so. I originally thought I was just going to do this with a Unisaw for now (with a router table extension) with the idea that someday I might just swap out the Unisaw for a Sawstop PCS and it would be easy to do that. But the more I've read about Sawstop and the little petty war he waged on the powertool industry the less interested in the concept I become. Sure I have a bunch of Sawstop parts in my project and sure the big corporate consolidation of the tool industry isn't blameless in all this, but I kinda feel like that fleeting time when Rockwell sold off Delta and Porter-Cable to Pentair was Delta (and Porter-Cables, I mean Porter-Cable came back from the dead) time to shine. I think it was the time of some of the best versions of their machines which was followed not long after by a lot of gimmicky nonsense. Not to say that a lot of the Rockwell versions of things were not well made, but it was stagnant and unevolved by the end. Under Pentair there was actually some real product evolution happening. Anyway, just MHO.

  7. #22
    OK, all very wordy time for some more pictures. I'm quite proud of my oval holes I made in the Unisaw table so that I could get the Unifence rail to line up all the way across with the Sawstop wing holes. the height difference between the two made everything not line up very well, and I could either not tie the Unisaw table into things or try and Oval the holes. I am using the newer style profile Unifence rail which has a T-nut slot on the back so alignment is more important. Anyway not an easy thing to do the oval hole is just a hair taller than double the width, exactly the height they needed to be, any closer and I don't think I could not have done them without a mill. I also drilled the shaper table, which was undrilled from the factory, it has reinforced areas in the casting for the holes in the same relative spots as the Unisaw holes. Oh and BTW to not chew up your extrusions always use square head nuts and bolts, most extrusions have just enough slop in them that a quarter turn too much, often before you think things are sufficiently snug, and that hex nut you were using is chewing an ugly hole into your T-slot. You have to really abuse a square nut to do that, it's point to point diagonal cross section is substantially bigger (in case you're paying attention and notice the bolts to the right in the picture).
    20200508_165607.jpg

    Here is a comparison of the older style Unifence rail vs the newer style (new style on the left, old style on the right). Note that the newer rail also has a T-slot on the bottom, which I gather was for some accessory stop block thingy, which is apparently a very obscure piece. Anyway I plan to use that to mount the rail for a Wixey digital fence gauge. I'm also planning on adapting a Wixey Planer height gauge to the shaper for digital height adjustment. For repeatability but more importantly because it just does decimal to fraction conversions so I don't have to think about math so much.
    20200509_175213.jpg

    Also the Unifence rail has now been cut (had to cut off 11/16") and with the end caps on is perfectly flush with the table on both ends, well actually about 1/64" inboard each way to compensate for the variation in the endcaps, so this way it'll clear the eventual sliding tables.
    20200509_175227.jpg
    20200509_175237.jpg

    Here's the fence at it's furthest practical point (where both outer vertical and horizontal alignment adjusters are still in solid contact with the rail:
    20200509_175333.jpg

    ...and from the other side, I'm thinking this is somehow useful:
    20200509_175349.jpg

    So remember the shaper can be fed front to back from the left of the fence or back to front to the right of the fence with regular router bits, with shaper bits it doesn't matter as they can be used right side up or upside down and motor is reversible. But anyway it means that there could be some edge routing operations that could be done that just use the Unifence and benefit from the JessEm stock guides, though it really doesn't matter which side the fence is mounted on, that'll work either way, but what it does give you is almost 70" of solid, flat work support to the left of the bit. And yes there are router fence versions of the JessEm stock guides, but the table saw ones are spring tension loaded and the router table versions are not, the table saw versions can also be adjusted to be further away from the fence or to follow different paths from each other to push the stock against the fence over a wider surface area. Anyway, like I said this could be a somehow useful feature and once I have the digital fence guage on this it should be very repeatable.

  8. #23
    My latest updates to the Unisawper;
    • Wixeyed the Unifence.


    • Wixeyed the Shaper height adjust (adapted the portable planer Wixey).


    • Installed the Grizzly sliding table.
    • Hacked up the original Delta extension table legs to support the sliding table (the ones that came with the Grizzly were kinda wimpy).


    • Hacked up a Bora extension table "T" to mobilize the slider legs (the rest of the "T" was used to join the 2 mobile bases)
    • Cut up the rest of the original extension table supports to make a support for a Durham Manufacturing slide frame.
    • Added the 6 Durham small parts boxes for doodad storage.


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