Ooo, my cam levers arrived, now swinging down the Uniguard is tool less.
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Ooo, my cam levers arrived, now swinging down the Uniguard is tool less.
20200430_125525.jpg
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Ken
Just curious, do you use things like a tenoning jig much (things that are cut vertically)? Back after I bought my cabinet saw I bought a Uniguard and it always seemed to be in the way, I did furniture restoration/repair on the side and made a lot of furniture parts. Seemed like some days I spent more time fussing with getting the guard out of the way than working. I'm the first to admit the actual blade guard worked well especially on cuts close to the rip fence along with a nicely designed mounting method. Lacking dust collection was also a bit of a negative for me.
I finally ended up saving the mounts and blade guard and scrapping the rest. I designed and made my own overhead arm system that got around most every issue I ran into with the Uniguard and it's been working out pretty good all these years. I even made it with replaceable blade guards so I could get dust control along with the ability to swing the arm out of the way when needed rather than having to remove the Uniguard when it conflicted with what I was doing. The only area I wish I could improve is the lift mechanism, which I made out of 1/4" steel and it works OK. I wish it could have been more substantial but without a mill it wasn't in the cards. I also made a smaller version for the shaper that though I don't use all the time, I do use when the situation permits.
Not suggesting you do this, rather if it doesn't work out then see what can be done to improve on it as far as the guard goes. It can become a very good system with some modification IMO.
Last edited by Paul Haus; 05-02-2020 at 11:34 PM.
Contributor
I would agree that your spindle and likely the whole setup isnt going to tolerate the 15K for long but in an low usage hobby type setup who knows. Most of these consumer level shapers are pretty weak overall to begin with so unfortunately its a lot of effort for a risk but it sure looks well executed and looks nice side by side. That mass of shinny cast iron is pretty nifty. In that situation, if it were me, and I wanted to run router bits (I rarely ever run table mounted router bits) Id be looking at a piece of that real estate to put a router lift in and have a shaper, router table, saw, all that do what they do well.
Pretty cool execution.
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Not sure I'd call it a consumer level shaper, most of these were sold as 3 phase machines which doesn't scream consumer to me, granted it isn't an Invincia or one of the newer Euro spindle molders, but it is mechanically a pretty substantial machine very much on par with Powermatics and Olivers. And I certainly would not consider a Delta heavy duty shaper to be something more consumer oriented than a builders quality hand tool with an non-continuous duty cycle rated universal motor.Originally Posted by Mark Bolton
The bearings that the spindle cartridge are built around are conservatively rated at 18,000 RPM, if they are running the newer NTN bearings and higher than that if running the older New Departure ones, continuous duty for tens of thousands of hours (years, decades actually). Spinning a 3 phase motor at 5000 RPM@90Hz, even ones that are labeled as 3500 RPM@60Hz is done all the time, even in production settings, on metal working machine retrofits all the time. There are countless threads on this subject on the Practical Machinist Forum, among others, where VFD/3 phase motor retrofits to metal lathes and vertical mills are done routinely and running 90-120Hz is common. Even early adopters that have been running early, far less sophisticated VFDs, in machines run daily for 20 years or more with overspeeding as their baseline speed. It has become practically standard operating procedure in that world as virtually all of the older, affordable machine tools are 3 phase, and most lack the granularity in speed selection for these machines to be most effective. Many new motors are even specifically rated for this type of operation from the factory. Fenner link belts and even just notched VX belts are rated for much more substantial loads and speeds than what the OEM V-belts are, this is probably the weakest link in the entire machine since space constraints limit it's pulley diameter and that is easily remedied with either of the a fore mentioned alternatives.
So I'm really not sure what part of this equation you guys think is the short coming of doing this, and what failures you envision this would cause, does the ability of this design to run at 10K RPM day in and day out for decades, somehow mean this machine is doomed to failure in short order because it's running faster than the stock pulley speed? And this most certainly means that it can't possibly be anyway near as reliable as a hand power tool mounted to a lift mechanism and support table that is less substantial in every possible way? This is kind of silliness. There is nothing about a shaper, and this particular shaper specifically that limits it's operational speed to 10K RPM other than that happens to be what it runs at with the stock pulley and motor combination which is based on what the effective operational speed of typical spindle cutter heads sold to be used with it are. The spindle cartridge itself is effectively rated past 18,000 RPM in 24/7-365 operation from 32-120F ambient temperature. Motors, unless specifically rated to run off of VFDs do not have speed ratings, however, most motors will have very similar type and rating of bearings to what the spindle has, so again we are looking at a rating far in excess of the intended speed. The only real practical limiting factor in how fast you can turn a 3 phase motor is the bearings and the ability of the fan to move air and cool the motor, everything else; amps/voltage etc, is programmatically handled by the VFD and VFDs specifically have these settings as well as frequency calibration routines for this purpose. Pretty much if a 3 phase motor is designed to run at 208-460V and you are running it in the low coil range (208-240), you aren't going to have a problem. An induction motor has no physical contact point between the armature and the frame other than the bearings, and a 3 phase motor does not have a starting capacitor and spinning 150% speed is no where near the trouble point of airflow. So if you have bearings rated way past 10K RPM and you only need about 5000 RPM to reach 15K at the spindle which is rated for at least 18K and a drive belt that claims 1/3rd the vibration and triple the power delivery while reducing heat when compared to the type of belt used stock, there is nothing in this scenario that suggests that any component will be being pushed past it's design capabilities. I have a very high level of confidence that an induction motored shaper with a VFD will be able to spin router bits at 15K more reliably and for more hours than any brushed DC motored router could. If it did fail where would it likely fail? Very, very likely the belt is the overwhelming weakest point which is probably more likely to fail if the machine is used as marketed than as an over clocked router, significantly higher load is probably more likely to be the failure event than the speed and even that is probably far less likely to fail at a light 15K router load than the original V-belt at a "normal" 10K shaper load.
Now, I could very well be wrong, but there is nothing to suggest, from any specifications of components or real world evidence in similar applications that this is based on flawed assumptions. A shaper is a pretty simple machine, far less complex than a vertical mill or an engine lathe where this is done routinely. There is no published limit to the components used that would indicate a problem point. I am not suggesting pushing any tooling bit beyond it's recommended specifications, quite the contrary I am only suggesting bits be spun at a reasonable compromise in order to give them a fair chance at achieving their intended performance. I would need to not just be wrong but be wildly wrong for this to be something that would dramatically compromise the machine, I really truly do not see what this could possibly cause that wouldn't already be a glaring problem with these machines used as advertised. I may very well, when it comes down to it, buy a new VFD rated motor for this since I will need to buy a motor anyway, and haven't really seen ones in really good condition cheap. My next major addition to the shop will almost certainly be a CNC router, undoubtedly before I re-speed the shaper actually, so my expectations of the shaper to do router things will be somewhat weighted against that. At this point the most likely first use of the shaper will be with a solid spindle spinning a Byrd Shelix helical head, which is why the shaper top has been redrilled to allow the fence to also be mounted facing left so that in conjunction with the Unifence (flipped to the right) it can be used as sort of a jointer/width planer. Probably a whole other can of worms.
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Yeah, Will be interesting for sure. Keep up with the thread as you move a long. Seems like a cool project.
Most every shaper out there from the "lower end" imports have always been available in three phase. Its in no way indicative of a machine that will run 10 hours a day 365 in a production environment (not that thats your aim) nor that its even an "industrial" level machine. Just opens a market to the manufacturer that would not be there if only for single phase. You can read the bearing woes of the lighter machines regardless of their paper ratings here in the archives.
Im sure there is a myriad of reasons from design, to cost, to engineering, to safety, to intended use, that typical shapers dont run at the speeds your shooting for though there are more high end machines that will. While I push large cutters on the CNC at 16K a lot (10HP), Im still suspect that anything other than a large diameter routerbit is not going to perform well at 15K but its a heck of a lot better than 10K for sure. We have router collets for one shaper and at 10K max they sit in the cabinet collecting dust. I would personally prefer a 3HP + router any day of the week but for sure, its worth a shot.
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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:
Last edited by Ken A Irwin; 05-04-2020 at 12:00 PM.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
[OP]
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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:
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...and from the other side, I'm thinking this is somehow useful:
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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.
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I have already made quite a few modifications to how the Uniguard works for some of the reason you mention. I installed rubber bumpers on the guard arms so they can be, shall we say, less gracefully flipped up without worrying about the casings cracking, which seems a fairly common issue. I am recessing the mountings so that they are up and under the table instead of mounted to the back of them so it isn't in the way of an outfeed table. The way it's mounted makes it so the "U" arm tube cants back at about 12 degrees from vertical which also means that it'll clear a lot more end cuts than it normally would if it was mounted straight vertically. I ordered extra brackets from Renovo Parts so it's a) more solid and B) can be slid left and right to adjust where the "U" is relative to the shaper. All those brackets are getting cam levers so that the guard can be adjusted or swung down out of the way easily without having to pull out any tools. I also have an extra top piece with the idea that I may modify it for dust collection. When I bought the saw it didn't come with either a guard or a splitter (it did have the mounts for an Excalibur splitter though), and an original replacement guard (plus a splitter) costs almost as much as what I paid for the new Uniguard, so that's what I did. It's a beefy piece, the splitter that came with it is convenient to put on or completely remove with a thumb screw, and will be quite easy to make a few extra splitters of various heights to get a sort of poor mans manual riving knife that isn't too inconvenient to use. The original splitter mount that came with it was tweaked and when I got the replacement I also got an extra splitter piece so I already hacked that one to just be level with the top of the blade fully raised. The Uniguard is by no means perfect, but I did want to have something on the saw that was convenient enough for me to force myself to use it and not just get chucked into a box somewhere as way too many guards do. I did replace the plastic side guards that came with it with some older case aluminum ones I bought off of ebay which make the guard feel more serious and not so much like 75lbs of steel holding up a toy. Not sure that's as good for any future dust collection mod but it does make you feel like it's something that belongs there.
The original extension table that came with the saw when I bought it was pretty much trash, it was de-laminating, warped and most of the screws were tore out. A Unifence is fairly useless without an extension table to ride along and I got it in my head that I wanted something permanent and not just another chunk of MDF/Plywood there. Right now it's been all about getting the "machine" put together so the saw has only been used for some minor narrow rips and cross cuts here and there, mostly UHMW, since I've owned it as this was really all I could do. I just got the shaper a little over a month ago and the cast iron wings maybe 2 weeks ago. It's not my first Unisaw, I bought an almost identical one to this one new twenty some years ago. That one got sold off, along with the rest of my shop, by my ex-wife who was watching my house, our old house, while I was out of town. So this is really me getting back into things, since I am now in a place in my life to do so.
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