I’m looking into making the parts for Roubo frame saws. Today I filed a new ratchet bar for my foley belsaw retoother. I need a longer bar and carrier for the 4ft plates. Pretty easy, just takes time. Clamped a 3 tpi saw to the side of the new bar and lined my file up. Quick test and it works great, next up is a longer carrier.

I haven’t gotten much done in the garage lately. It’s been a bit of a mess too, doesn’t take long to fill it up with random stuff when you aren’t using it much. I did a miter saw at the beginning of the summer, had some issues with the set but thankfully me and the customer got it sorted out. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve started cleaning up and setting up a new toy. A medium arm radial arm saw. It’s massive! And today I cleaned up the first saw in weeks. I now have three saws to make and hopefully I’ll get plenty of time in the garage soon.

I’ve been putting this off for too long. I had a saw till at our old house but it was a quickly thrown together one that wasn’t worth keeping. And this garage had plenty of room at first to just keep hanging saws lol! But I have slowly added things like shelves, cabinets, lumber rack and so on. I had some left over plywood from the rolling cabinet builds and just enough paint left over from another project to build this. I think I counted that it will hold 37 full sized saws.

The saws I sent with unfinished handles awhile back now look great! Customer used his own finish and they look amazing.

Finished up another dovetail saw today. I really like this curly maple. I think ill need to make myself a couple saws with it before I sell it all.

Finished up these two saws today and sent out a couple kits yesterday. Its nice to get some shop time in!

Curly maple handles, one saw 10 inches long, the other is 12 inches long. I was specifically asked to send them with the handles unfinished. Customer has a particular dye he wishes to use. But he did promise to send pictures.

With my brass finally here I was able to get a couple kits together and install the backs on the two saws I’m building.

While waiting on brass hardware for saws to come in, I’ve been working on a couple of tool carts for my RAS’s. Picked up a second one, a nice 1030ra.

Carts look great! Later I’ll do the drawers, and the plan is to paint them to match my workbench. 30 inches tall, 37.5 wide and 27.5 deep. Both saws fit perfectly and the wheels are double locking 4 inch casters.

I sharpened a D-8 today. Needed a little extra jointing but wasn’t too bad. The interesting one was a NOS Stanley. Early 90s I think but it looked and felt pretty good in hand. Customer specifically wanted it retoothed from crosscut to a rip. He even told me he knew it was in amazing shape, nice sharp teeth but he wanted this filed rip 5.5 ppi at 6 degrees rake. I was almost sad to retooth it, but it came out great and I hope he enjoys it.

As the title says, I used my radial arm saw today for a quick project. Aside from test cuts, this was its first go. Checking with a square, the cuts are perfect.

On another website I read a post that summed up the “dangers” of this saw pretty well. In a day and age where you can go buy a tool off the shelf and use it 5 minutes later without any training, an old tool you just picked up used could be dangerous without proper training. Back when these were popular and first coming out we had people to show us what do. These machines were also factory fresh and all aligned.

Any power tool is dangerous. Tablesaws cut off fingers and send boards threw the wall all the time. When I was 19, fifteen years ago, I bought a cheap tablesaw and immediately went to use it. A board flew over my shoulder and I never touched one again until recently. Now, after watching video instructions, I know I messed up somehow. Sadly I see a lot of videos where they might check the blade is square but they don’t use a guard, a knife, or double check the fence us parallel. Or they reach over blade or decide not to use featherboards or push boards. But yet we are quick to say operator error and not blame the machine. Which is true but why do people blame the machine and not the operator on a radial arm saw?

People have been buying these used for decades without learning their new toy in and out. Tune it back to factory specs, use the CORRECT blade, use the guard like its supposed to be used, use the anti-kickback pawls. These are usually missing so find one or make one. And if ripping, make a push board. I highly recommend looking up Brian Weekley’s youtube videos and the Northern Workshop videos. Very detailed.