Recently I tried to slink away from the pressures of the world. A moment “off” to retire to my shop and get my grove back. I chose a simple task. When you’ve got a shitstorm in your wake, a thousand things on your mind, and eleventy irons in the fire it’s best to stick with easy jobs. Simple jobs = small successes = a feeling you’re going in the right direction. But enough navel gazing, time for minor garageneering:
This is my humble 10″ Ryobi table saw; purchased a couple years ago when my last saw died. It’s cheap and adequate. It’s barely adequate… but adequate nonetheless.
Except those spindly legs. They annoy me. Better to ship the saw without them and add the price difference to the quality of the build. That said, they’re “good enough” (and maybe handy if you work at remote sites / though I don’t cart my saw around like that). From my point of view, they’re the skinny folding anemic wimpy version of what every saw really needs, which is chunky beefy legs with wheels.
It works and I got what I paid for. No regrets but it’s time to do better. Here’s a close up of the chicken legs that some Ryobi marketer is touting as “portable!” Note that the saw is held on by little plastic rotating deals that slide into plastic slots and rotate to “lock down” with plastic knobs. God forbid a dude with a table saw can use a wrench and bolts. The bottom of the Ryobi has little cylindrical tubes where they obviously expect any sane man to drill a hole and insert a bolt. Why not pre-drilled? Because marketing? Perhaps a hole for a right and proper bolt would mess up the “clean lines” of the little plastic doohickeys? It took two minutes with a power drill to rectify that mistake. (Also, I didn’t see a way to remove the doohickeys without destructive means, so I left them intact. Bonus points that they don’t stick out below the level of the base housing.)
The plastic doohickeys are in a rectangle; as God intended and as required by any reasonable set of folding legs. But the drillable bolt hole “suggestions” create an irregular quadrilateral. Really? Wouldn’t it facilitate measuring and centering if the bolt holes were somewhat logical? The star of today’s show is an old table saw stand that came with a saw I got at a garage sale. I bought the saw and stand for $20. I used the old saw a few years until something went “kathump” in the inner workings and it got something a bit like Dodge Death Wobble. I could probably have fixed the saw but I was in a hurry and I’m naturally cautious about table saws. So bought a new Ryobi (I was on a budget), removed the still usable stand, and tossed the saw. I used the stand as a paint station for a while. I got my $20 out of it just for that! Then I got tired of it taking up space so I tossed it in the barn for a few years. I planned to bolt the Ryobi straight to the stand but the Ryobi’s plastic housing is every possible shape but rectangular. No worries. I cut a hunk of plywood and mounted that, then did some tracing and cutting. Notice the four mount points for the Ryobui? (The four holes that are not occupied in this photo.) It’s not a trapezoid, parallelogram, or any other sane shape. This mystifies me. Once the saw was bolted down, the stand went from an old piece of junk to a proud and useful object once more. I installed four casters because there’s nothing better than a tool that can roll out of the way when you don’t need it. I’m amused by the large and clear brand names. Apparently what I’ve created is a hybrid. Is it a Ryostman or a Craftoby?
A.C.
P.S. You might infer from this post that I’ve got something against my cheap Ryobi and that’s not true at all. It serves well for what it is. I don’t use a table that much but when you need a table saw you’re best served by a (you guessed it) table saw. In many situations, an adequate but unimpressive Ryobi is a big step up from dinking around with a handheld circular saw.
