Katie dropped in Thursday night unannounced. Lucky me! She had her brother’s truck, so after I took her to lunch today at a chinese restaraunt, we went to Lowes to pick up a table saw I have been looking at for a few weeks now and a sheet of plywood. The last saw they had. Every other person who walks through that door is likely to toss the box that the saw came in, but I am only going to use the thing every six months or so, right? Of COURSE my box is completely mangled. No point tearing the thing down and re-packing it for storage now.
The saw is a “contractors” saw, so it is designed to be portable. The legs fold up, and it has a handle and wheels so it can be pushed around where you want it. Really quite slick. It weighs in at a trim 73 pounds. I am not going to want to put it up on a shelf or anything, but it is managable.
The table expands to a pretty big size. The table goes out like 16″ before you can expand the table out with the rip fence on it. Pretty cool. There is a section in back to help hold the material as well. I also picked up 2 adjustable, folding roller stands. I knew I was going to have trouble manhandling a sheet of plywood by myself. I am likely to go get 2 more if I ever need to do a full sheet of plywood by myself again. 
This is all that is left of my $26.95 peice of 1/2 inch birch plywood. I am cutting it into 1 inch strips to make the frame of a folding kayak I am going to make. I made $2.21 worth of sawdust in the dust collector which caught probably 3/4 of the sawdust and on the ground. I had to go to Target and get a little hand broom to clean off the saw and clean up my mess.
I am tired. I walked about 5 miles today between going to Target and Skyline for supper, plus I was on my feet all afternoon assembling and working that saw – I am used to sitting on my duff all day long.
Oh yeah! I put the whole saw together and only had one little un-opened baggy of spare parts! (I think they are adjustment shims to square up the saw blade to the table incase it is off. The instructions don’t mention them beyond the parts list)
