Making screws

It's been a long time since I posted. I have been making wooden screws for workbenches on and off for the past few years. I would buy a piece of 16/4 and make as many as I could. This was mainly due to the difficulty in finding 16/4 hard maple.

Recently I was able to source and nice supply of 16/4 and found a supplier that assures me they can get the material I need. So I plan to make the screws available on a regular basis.

I plan to make a web page with instructions for installing the screws, making garters, and bench plans. I will probably take a few months for me to get that set up. I will also be opening an etsy store, as well as continuing to sell on eBay.

I will post here occasionally to keep everyone updated on the progress of the screws. And I also plan to post about the other woodworking projects I work on.

I am making a large batch of screws. Here are 89 blanks roughed out, and ready to be cut to final length:


I'll keep updating as I work on these.

Well it's finally done. Actually it was done a week ago, but I've been so busy I haven't had a chance to post. So I am going to do the update now. I have been using it for the past week, quite a bit actually, and it's been working great!

After completing all of the parts, and before installing them I painted them.

The picture doesn't show a lot but if you look close you'll notice the knife itself is missing from here. Because once I got home I checked the width of the knife against the width of the blade. The knife was .135" wide and the saw blade teeth are .120". This was not good, so in order to flatten it I tried running it though my drum sander. That didn't work to well, because after 2 hours of sanding it was down to .130". But fortunately we have a surface grinder at work. So the next day I stayed late and ground down the blade to .110". I planned to paint the knife and figured a little thinner is better than thicker. And with the paint on it's .115.

Now that that was taken care of, the first thing I had to do was to mount the pivot ring. In order to get it centered I turned a stepped cylinder on my lathe.

The smaller end fit's in the arbor hole, and the larger end is the same size as the pivot ring. I slipped this into place and marked the holes on the yoke (I turned it a touch to small hence the tape).

I then drilled the holes for the screws and tapped them for a 10-24 screw.

With the screw holes in place I mounted the ring, and fortunately it came out to be in the center (It looks like the entire ring is painted in this shot, but only the face where the screws are mounted is painted. The parts of the ring and mating flange that touch were masked off and left unpainted.

I then quickly found out that I had to remove the ring to get the retainer behind it. Then I mounted the flange and the retainer. I spun the whole thing a few times to check for interference from other parts and happily it cleared everything.

Then I installed the adjustable arm mounting bracket.

And then the arm.

This is actually an after picture. with the arm installed I found first that I had drill the pivot hole in the wrong location. I must have moved the table on the mill in the wrong direction from my marked point, since the hole was 1/8" above the line when it needed to be 1/8" below the line. So I flipped the piece and re-drilled the hole on my drill press. The arm also hit the letters that were cast into the yoke (visible just below the arm in the above pic) and the yoke casting also flared out a lot from the pivot point and I had to grind some of the arm away to clear these two obstacles. But after that everything moved freely and apparently level.

So the I installed the arbor assembly.

And the next part was probable the hardest part of the entire installation. Putting on the belts. I used a car jack to lift the motor after the retaining bolts were loosened. When installing the belts and lowering the motor I found that the motor had to be perfectly level to the arbor or 1 of the 4 belts would be slack. I had always intended to put the original belts back on, since I remembered them being in good shape when I took them off. But after looking at them when the time came, they were in pretty rough shape. So after calling every place nearby that carries belts, I found that no one had 4 in stock. Actually no one had more than 1 in stock. So I drove to Woodcraft and picked up some link belt. I like link belts since they do a great job of eliminating vibration and they are always the correct size. but they are overkill on this saw since it never vibrated anyway. but here's the arbor in place with the belts on.

I gotta admit it does look pretty cool with those belts on though (of course you can't see them with the top on).

Next was the knife arm.

At this point I pulled out my Wixey angle gauge, zeroed it with one of the cross members and put it on the far end of the arm. I then adjusted the pivot point of the arm up and down and forward and back until I had it pivoting (almost) perfectly. Whenever I would tighten the bolts it would go out just a hair, but when all was done it was only off .8 degrees through it entire rotation, and this is most likely due to the pivot ring not being perfectly centered. but that only translates to .018" of a difference in height of the knife which is about 1/64" so I can live with that.

At this point I put the blade on the arbor and knife on the saw. I had to do a little grinding for clearance from the blade, and shorten it's height just a tad. I also ground a bevel on the front to have a knife edge so the wood would not hit an abrupt edge. So when when I was done it was about 1/8" from the blade, and about 1/16 lower than the top. The split in the arm worked really well, I had to fuss with back of the arm a little to get the knife perfectly aligned with the blade. And the oversized hole design allowed me to do that easily. The knife holding mechanism works great as well. 1/4 turn and the knife comes out. But since this works the way a riving knife should, I will only be removing it when I put my dado stack in.

Awesome! So at this point I put the top back on adjusted everything and here it is:

I repainted the knife after taking the picture and forgot to take one after that. But the knife works perfectly! it goes through the entire range of motion of the saw, tilting and up and down.

And after using it a little, I actually had a piece of wood close up and pinch the knife! The blade spun like the wood wasn't there, and I was able to safely shut down the saw and remove the wood. This wasn't something I was trying to do, but not only does the knife work going up and down while hugging the blade but it also works as the safety device it's supposed to be!

So all in all this was a huge success! I have about 40 hours in the design, and another 40 hours in the building of the pieces. I am a much better machinist that when I started (I'm still not that good but better than when I started).

I'm very happy with all of this in every way, and now I'm happy to get back to real woodworking. The next thing I plan to make is an overhead guard that hangs from the ceiling with dust collection built in. I also have to work on the dust collection in the saw, but I was anxious to get back up and running so that will be sometime in the future.

If you decide to build one of these and have any questions let me know.

Just about done. I did a little clean up and drilled a few holes after the picture was taken but here are the parts basically done. (I don't know why it's rotated blogger keeps spinning it)

I am waiting for larger shoulder bolts to come in. I accidentally drilled the holes in the link arm a little to big so instead of 1/4" shoulder bolts I need 5/16". Not a big deal but a few days of waiting. I took all the parts home last night and will clean them up tonight and paint them. I need to mic the riving knife and the table saw blade to make sure the knife is not to thick. If it is I plan to run it through my drum sander a few times to thin it out.

I'll snap a few pics tonight as I work on it. I hope to get it installed this weekend. If everything goes as planned I'll have a working riving knife by Saturday evening. If not well...

I'm still working on it.

I've still been chugging along. I am almost done, the two mounting blocks are left and a few holes to drill. I hope to be done by the middle of next week.

The one thing I definitely learned while doing this is metal work is so much slower that wood work, and only getting about an hour and half a night makes for slow going. I've made a few mistakes none that really affect to much, but I'm getting more familiar with the machines and the techniques.

I have gotten a few emails asking about the sketchup model, and for a copy of it. I will be happy to post it for anyone who wants it. But I need to clean it up first. Look for it in a week or so.

And also the thing to remember is that this is for a 12"-14" (34-350) table saw. For the most part it's the same as the 10" unisaw, but the parts for the 10" are smaller, so if you decide to make one of these you'll have to scale the model down.

If someone does make one of these for the the 10" and wants to share their model I would be happy to post it here or link to it.

Progress is happening

A lots been happening in the last few days. I've been busy working on the knife, so I haven't been posting, but here are the video's I promised of the prototype in action. The first with everything in position.

The second with the blade (temporarily in place)

The work in the machine shop is going well. I don't have metal working equipment in my shop so I have been using the machines at work. I've been staying late after the machine shop guys go home and using the equipment then.

I didn't take as many pictures as I should have, I tend to get working and forget to take pictures.

I bought a rotary table to make the main plate that the pivot disk will mesh with.

(I took these pics with my phone, sorry for the quality)

Here it is lined up on the table.

Here is a pic of milling the final size.

And a close up of the ring (with the bottom milled).

After I was that far there I made the ring.

This was a 4" piece of round stock chucked in the lathe and turned down. The machinist suggested that I turn the end over sized and turn down a post that will fit in a collet. He said this would be safer and give a better level of accuracy. This is after initial turning, before cutting the chunk off.

Here is the piece cut off and mounted in the collet and turned down to size, ready to be bored out.



It Fits!

More to come in the next few days!

It's been a few days since posting but things are moving along well. I made the wooden prototype. and found a few problems that needed addressing. After building the knife holding block I found that I needed everything to be adjustable. I needed to be able to tweak the knife this way and that. So I split the arm and added two blocks face to face to hold the arm, but the one block will have over sized holes (by 1/16") that will allow for tweaks.

The next problem was with the knife, I can put in slots to mount the knife forward and back, but I needed to add a stop to adjust the height of the knife. So in the block I added an allen head bolt that will sit between the legs and hold the knife up.

Here is a sketchup pic of the modified design.

I was able to build this and put the arbor in place and adjust everything. Worked beautifully. So I brought everything to the machine shop at work and will start the actual metal work this week.

I'll try to get a video or a few pics of the wooden proto up this week, as well as a few in process pics.

Riving knife proto 2

So I made a few changes to the prototype in the shop. Not to much but I did lower the parallel arm 3/4". about as low as I can get it. The further apart the arms are the more they stay in parallel. To mount the arm to the trunnion I decided to go with 2 1/4" blocks. I can mount one to the saw to give left right adjustment. and the other mounted at 90 will have up/down/front/back alignment. So I can tune in the position of the pivot. I also increased the size of the ring 1/4. and shortened the overall length of the arm.

The plan is to try and make a new prototype this weekend. But first I am going to mock up the knife and it's mount.