Anyone who has worked a few days with a radial-arm saw knows that the manufacturers' manuals do not show you how to get the machine to work as precisely as needed for good woodworking. The text books on radials tease you with accessories, jigs and projects but still don't give you much help in setting up your machine.
In the early '80s I presented seminars on the use of the radial-arm saw to craftsmen and hobbyists across Canada. The first hour of each seminar was dedicated to these problems of line-up and precision. No, you will not find videos on the Radial Arm Saw here -- I never shot any video for that back in 1980. But I did write a book.
This book is, in fact, the refined product of all those teaching sessions. In plain language, it gives detailed instructions on making the notoriously sloppy radial arm saw cut dead square and to a tolerance of one 128th of an inch with a simple saw blade. This book is the necessary companion to all other information on your radial-arm saw and I like to think that it is helping craftsmen everywhere to keep their solid old saws working.
Since 1987 when this book was first published by Lee Valley Tools, it has been recognized as the bible for setting up and using radial arm saws in a precision fashion. But with the advent of the sliding miter boxes, and the fact that few people ever used their radial arm saws as precision instruments, the use of this wonderful machine has declined. Some manufacturers have dropped out of the market; others don't take their saws very seriously. So, although we sold 5,000 copies of this very specialized book, sales were not strong enough to warrant a new press run.
But then along came cyber space and the potential for web publishing or at least electronic distribution of books. This has opened the door to cost effective publishing of very limited quantities of a given book, and hence the revival of out-of-print books. Essentially all I have to do is the layout, and you print it yourself, all of it, or only the pages you want. You will find that if you can print in 600dpi, the photos will come out as clear as the original publication. Since then a few people every week ask for the book -- so here it is available as a download pdf for purchase.
The one publishing bug is that the layout was designed for left and right pages (odd pages on the right, even pages on the left) as in a book, rather than consecutive pages out of your printer. Knowing that will help if you get lost in the text. The best copy of this book can be had by printing both sides on thick paper stock and then putting it into a three ring binder. The blank pages were left in so that such a layout would work.
I read through this book twenty+ years later and found that nothing needed to be updated; those old saws just keep on cutting. Hence the rest of this book is as originally published. For a while I sold it on the web, then as part of a DVD, and now here it is back on the web.
Just click here to go to PayPal to pay for it ($14.95) and then download the book -- no more waiting for the mail.
Learning Curve 75
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You might be interested in a question/answer exchange about the sanding disk shown on page 52 to level out the table. You can see it all with photos in a database article: just search "Radial Saw" for "Radial Arm Saw Sanding Disk".
jon