Table Saw, Table Came, Table Conquered...

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The Finished Article


Another domestically-orientated post today (if I start on politics, it's going to get very sweary, so I'm playing it cool again). Finally finished assembling the table saw I got from Leo last week. Construction was a fiddly affair, not helped by the instruction leaflet having exceedingly tiny print. I would have had no problems twenty years ago, but even with reading glasses, it was a squint. Everything plodded along reasonably well with the assembly of the main part of the machine; myriad nuts and bolts, washers plain and spring, etc., etc.

Having got the bulk of it together, it was time to assemble the stand - easy looking job; a few steel pressings, captive nuts and bolts - except complacency had set in and assumptions made about the symmetry of the device. At this point, in my mind, the ditching of the intructions seemed reasonable, faced with a straightforward finish to the job - after all, the hard work was done. Until I came to locate the apparently square base of the saw with the stand itself. Could I align the four bolt holes on the saw with the four on the base? Could I buggery. No amount of messing about would get more than three bolts to drop in, and then under duress. RTFM time.

Turns out that the spacing of the mounting holes in the base,  needlessly, given the amount of leeway available, are different fore & aft to laterally: by five-sixteenths of an inch, necessitating that  the steel pressings making up the braces between the legs of the thing be longer on one side than the other. By five-sixteenths of a sodding inch (that's approx 8mm for those who don't know Imperial). I ask you, what on earth possesses someone to put that in as a design feature? The cost in tooling for the extra stamping and pressing required alone surely should have begged the question why, please God, why? from someone further up the food chain.

I know the thing was made in China, but I would guess it was designed and specced in the UK. Probably by the same person who designs Stoves and New World cookers, more shining examples of that eccentricity of approach that has helped to see off so much British manufacturing industry in the last fifty years. Decisions taken at management level, not on the shop floor; dare I mention British Leyland? Oops, got a bit political, there...

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