Project Update: Hey, What's That Sound?

As I mentioned in the Day 92 post, the table saw was not cutting at a perfect 90-degree angle after I had set it up; it was off by about half a millimeter, which is small, yet significant. I thought and thought and thought about why this might be and decided there was a screw-type stop inside the saw that I needed to adjust to allow the saw to come up to a perfect 90 degrees. But this was silly because it was the tilt of the blade that was off, not the height.

As I was working to diagnose what was going on, I decided to bring the blade to its full height and measure the angle one more time. As I was cranking away, I heard a "creeeeeeeeaaaaaaakkkkkk..." as the blade reached full height. This gave me pause for reflection, which gave me time to think, "Okay, something's not right here." I decided at that point the next step was to take the motor cover off the saw to see what was catching where.

The photo above is the back side of the saw, but it still gives you a shot of the culprit. Here's what was happening: I had mounted the power cord back onto the motor after I installed it (to keep it out of the way) on the wrong screw. When I cranked the motor assembly up to reach full blade height, it was pulling the power cord through a grommet in the case in a way that was not good. When I took a peeky peeky inside, I noticed a cord that was extremely taught - I could have shot an arrow with the thing. This was holding the motor back just enough that it was creating the miniscule blade tilt.

I immediately lowered the motor assembly and moved the power cord clip to another screw and voila! - no more weird sounds, hard-turning height adjustment wheel or off-kilter blade. Sure, I feel pretty stupid about this, but, hey, I promised to write about everything during this build discovery process - warts and all.

I hope you enjoyed this wart.

Until next time...