Tool-Rank.com: "We have miter saws with lasers, drills with lasers, and even hand saws with lasers, but up until now I have never seen a table saw with a laser. Rockwell has finally given us the laser line table saw you never knew you needed. The laser is designed to make it easier to see exactly where the saw blade will meet the wood, and should really come in handy for getting accurately sized miter cuts.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Rockwell: New Laser Line Table Saw
Tool-Rank.com: "We have miter saws with lasers, drills with lasers, and even hand saws with lasers, but up until now I have never seen a table saw with a laser. Rockwell has finally given us the laser line table saw you never knew you needed. The laser is designed to make it easier to see exactly where the saw blade will meet the wood, and should really come in handy for getting accurately sized miter cuts.
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4 comments:
File this blog entry under "Should we have a Saw Stop" while you're at it. I know there is a wide market for tools that make tasks easier in order to make them more doable by less skilled people, which in turn can bring the costs of business and private contracting down... But this seems a lot like selling a fish a bicycle to me. While it may, indeed, help brings contractors' costs of doing business down (in terms of both paying for skilled labor and time spent), I just don't see how it will do either significantly. I will always argue that the time spent teaching someone to be a better craftsman will pay off in the long run better than lasers on table saws. "Better miter cuts?" Because the laser shows where the saw blade will touch the work? I can do that with a pencil mark. Please.
These laser guided things are always a large waste of money in my opinion. But with this one being the first table saw with a laser on it I wonder if it works better. The lasers are always not that exact and you can never just make a cut by the laser you still have to check by the blade or you will have a board that is too small or too big. I wonder how exact this one is. The attachments that this table saw has seem to be pretty good. I wonder how they get it to work without it blinding the operator. I would like to see one of these in use and be able to uses it and see how it works.
I only have experiences using laser chop saws, but it was contrary to Robert's. Perhaps the laser on this one was just well calibrated, but you really could trust the laser line for accurate cuts.
Like Jacob, I too can do the same thing without a laser. But being realistic about it: It's faster and it's more accurate. That saves labor hours as well as materials. Looking at a projected line will always be faster than bringing the blade to the material.
Additional benefits: Inexperienced crew in a college scene shop? I say "yes please" to things that make life easier for everyone.
I know where the blade is going. I set the fence up X distance away. Unless it was an automated and it was just for me to visually check what the machine was doing, I really could not care about a laser. The only tools with a laser that i could trust to have a high degree of accuracy was the Festool chop saws. Even then, i used the laser as a balpark tool and not with actually checking my cut in anyway.
So far, i have yet to see lasers have any real impact on work efficiency. There are few times where i have even turned one on, and it was for that once in a long while random project that had some funky depth cuts. Even then, like Jake said above, the pencil still works just fine.
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