Tools of the Trade: Brian Sullivan, a gearhead who frequents the Garage Journal Forum, gave me permission to use the photos he posted of the construction a pole barn at his home in Ohio. The barn itself is nice enough but what grabbed my attention was the table saw used by the Amish carpenters who built it.
3 comments:
This is something that has never crossed my mind. I always imagined Amish people using all the hand saws, yankee screwdrivers and things like that. I never once thought that the Amish would want to enhance past the archaic forms of tools they originally started out with. I wonder where they found the resources to build this saw - seeing as some pieces of it (like the gas tank and metal punched-out framing) seem manufactured and also not available to a strictly Amish community. This table saw reminds me of the saw my summer theatre had before we go a real table saw. It was a upside-down circular saw bolted to a piece of 3/4” ply with those metal punch-out legs. It was a pretty scary tool to use and these Amish ones give me the same feeling. Anything that fast moving and capable of glancing off a screw and sparking does not seem like it should be near a gas power source.
And I thought that putting a circular saw on the bottom of a table was a jank solution. This is actually a pretty good solution to an unusual problem, and I wonder why there isn’t a commercially available gas powered table saw out there. I also didn’t know that Amish people were allowed to use power tools. I guess what the article says about not being connected to the grid is the main issue, but it seems that they might be trying to “hack” the Amish rules. I mean, what’s to stop this solution from eventually becoming a gas-powered generator to a regular table saw? Then where does the distinction lie? It’s still cool to me though to see what they came up with. I saw a hack for a homemade table saw once that involved building it from scratch and basically doing to same thing as this, but it was way less jank and it looked like a really reliable saw. I wonder what would happen to this saw if there were a sawstop connected to it. Would the whole thing just fall apart?
Gas powered table saw. Oh man, that is definitely something I have not encountered or seen before. And a power tool hack by the Amish community no less! Actual tool aside, I find it interesting that (at least this part of) the Amish community follows their code so strictly that this gas table saw hack is necessary, but is still ok breaking the spirit of their law by dodging the letter of the law against electricity. How is gas power justified if electrical power is not? Anyways, the saw itself is pretty impressive for a random homemade piece of gear. Using an actual Honda engine is a definite plus! Perhaps this is simply the original bench top table saw. I can't say I've seen many gas powered saws commercially available. But I would be interested to find out if such a series of products exists. I definitely could see a use case for working on site where electricity is either inconvenient or entirely inaccessible.
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