Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Three Scary Table Saws
Tools of the Trade: The folks who collect vintage machinery are very appealing. Not content to shine tools up and put them on display, they run them too. Here are three vintage table saws in action, scary for their single-stroke gasoline engines, crank starters, exposed belts and flywheels, and other mechanisms that would give a tool company lawyer panic attacks. Surprisingly, two of the saws have blade guards. Go figure.
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4 comments:
These are ridiculous! And kind of unreliable. The first one has the belt jump off pretty soon after they start using it, aka on the first log. It then took them a while to put it back on. The second one looks SUPER useful, and we should get one for Carnegie Scenic. The third one just looks like a normal table saw but with the added danger of an exposed belt. I can see why these guys like using the dangerous saws over the modern safe ones; it adds a spark of adventure.
All of these have had their uses in the past, so I guess we could still use them nowadays, but why waste the money and space on one of those giant things when you could be using a small, more reliable one? These don't seem all too reliable. They need to step up to the modern age and stop playing with their old toys.
So...these are really cool. It is fun to see the progress that has been made in machine design. Basically, I am grateful for the development the table saw industry has gone through and I do not actually get the "oh gosh I'm going to kill myself on this thing" feeling from the current table saws (at least from the one at CMU). I really like the machine (the second one) that has the table saw, planer, and sander all in one. I definitely think that someone could get hurt pretty badly on one of those (especially with the table saw blade all out and exposed), but the overall machine is quite noteworthy. I know here at CMU from first hand experience it is a huge pain in the butt to get out the planer and joiner because they are so large and heavy, not to mention that once they are out on the shop floor they take up a ton of space. It would be great if they could somehow be a table attachment. But then again someone would definitely loose a finger, hand, arm, etc.. on it.
I could see the combination table saw making a return to the market one day just for the ability to have everything in one (then again it probably won't happen because then the company would only sell one machine instead of three). These machines definitely make me respect lumber workers of the past lumber workers. After looking at these machines I decided to look into how current lumber mills operate and see whether it was similar to this or not. Nowadays lumber mills are purely hydraulic and electronic with gas powered engines. The progress that we've made is absolutely remarkable.
So I thought saws like these were only made for horror movies. Now i know they really exist. I like the rustic elements of the blade and the table, but these saws are ridiculous. If I saw one in the distance I would keep my distance because the thought of being near one scares me a little. And not that saws scare me.... but those blades are out of control, and if an accident were to happen, it wouldn't be a little one.
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