when I was a greenie, back in 1986, old guys were telling me instead of these "packages" of headers, crips, etc being sent out for units we were framing, "best thing is set up a RAS and cut everything on the job" (from scraps).Never dealt with a RAS, but around here in the SF Gay Area they seem to be FREE or near free on Craigslist and have been so for decades.I'm planning on moving to Flyover, USA soon, but don't have a good place to put one or any reason to own at the moment, so I'm thinking I should grab one on my way out.Thots?https://sfbay.craigslist.org/eby/tls/d/emeryville-rockwell-10-radial-arm-saw/7921028850.html
>>2991930Radial Arm Saws are temperamental. They have to be very stoutly built or they won't hold their adjustments properly. Then everything you cut will be off. The problem you have is they started to be built to a price-point starting in the 1960s and they just went to shit after that. Especially when they started to be imported from Asia.They can also be dangerous. They are right up their between table saws (less dangerous) and swing saws (more dangerous) in terms of their ability to fucking mangle you. If you get careless and take too deep a cut, or cut too quickly, or the wood pinches the blade that fucking motor carriage will dig into the wood and jump right at you. I've met people that have lost fingers, lost a hand, even knew a guy that fucking died when one got him. It pulled him in and marched up his arm like Sherman's March to the Sea. Died of blood loss before the ambulance could even get to him. Sears sold a line that was so dangerous they got sued and lost big time. They had to recall almost ever single saw they sold.That said, they are very versatile. A plain one can cross cut, rip, miter, and compound miter easy as can be. Most models also have a threaded shaft on the back of the motor. You can mount a chuck to it and use it as a drill or spindle sander. You can mount a plate to it and it becomes a disc sander. I've also seen old, weird, dangerous attachments. They can make it a lathe, a planer, or a router.
>>2991980>>2991930That Rockwell should be avoided. It is from the 70s and Rockwell was cutting costs to the bone to try and stay relevant in the tool industry at the time. Tools were a really small part of their business and they didn't want to invest in them. They were too busy raking in cash working for NASA on the Space Shuttle, satellites, and other shit. They were also a major supplier of industrial automation stuff, early microprocessors, and a major military contractor. They finally said fuck it about 1980 and either discontinued or sold off their tool lines over the next few years. Pentair ended up with their portable and stationary tools lines. Their metalworking and pneumatic lines disappeared. Pentair didn't buy the Rockwell name so they sold stationary tools using the Delta name and portable tools under the Porter-Cable name, which had both been purchased from Rockwell. Quality actually improved under Pentair but things went to shit again around 2000 when they fucked up a major consolidation and relocation operation to a newly built facility in Jackson, Tennessee. The fuckup took years to sort out, resulted in the firing of the entire management team that handled it, and they started producing more and more of their stuff in Taiwan to compensate. They also pushed the union in their sole unconsolidated plant in Tupelo, Mississippi to lower wages. When the union refused to go low enough (they basically wanted them to match Taiwan's payroll cost) Pentair said they would close the plant. They ended up selling their entire tool operation off to Black and Decker and it all went to Asia after that.Older Rockwell/Delta radio arm saws were good though. Picture related. Get ones with either the little red 'r' logo or the Delta Milwaukee logo. Or, if you find one, a Red Star Products saw. That is the company Rockwell purchased to add radial arm saws to their tool lines. They are good machines and stoutly built, its just the newer stuff was too lightly built.
>>2991930You can use another type of saw that will kill you less, like miter.
>>2991983DeWalt radial arm saws are also fucking legendary. They invented the tool and they made the best ones. The really early ones are overbuilt as fuck. Later, they split the line into 'home' and 'industrial' products. In the attached photo you can tell the difference easily. The one with the green rounded arm was the original and later industrial model and the one with the blue squared off arm was the home model. Both of those examples are good machines. The home models were a bit lighter in construction but were still solid machines. Late examples of the home models were not good though. Industrial machines remained top quality until Black & Decker sold the business in 1988. Those industrial models are still being made by the Original Saw Company. B&D, meanwhile, rebranded their higher end power tools 'DeWalt' in 1992, because they had ruined the B&D name and DeWalt still meant quality.DeWalt was independent until 1947, when AMF bought them. Quality remained high. In 1960 Black & Decker bought them. By the end of the decade they started cost cutting. The model on the bottom row, far left looks a lot like the AMF home models. The difference is that the top of the arm is a plastic shell. All the original and AMF designs had an arm made of a single piece of cast steel. They were stout and held up well. B&D changed them to cheaper casting that had an open top. This made them cheaper to make and easier to assemble but made them flex more under load. This is easier to spot with the model on the bottom, far right. The two bottom, middle models are absolute trash. They are basically made out of thin stamped steel. Garbage. They flex way too much to be useful for large cuts. Avoid at all costs. There are enough round arm models still around that you should probably just get one of them anyway. The speckle paint models are kino.
>>2991995Another good one is Walker-Turner. These machines were overbuilt as hell but are less common that others. If you can find one and it wasn't abused it will probably outlive you. They were not on the market as long as the DeWalts or Rockwell/Delta/Milwaukees as Walker-Turner was purchased by a company called Kearney and Trecker in 1948 and they refocused the company on more heavy duty tools. Their 'Light-Heavyweight' drill presses would go on to be the gold standard for such machines, but a lot of their woodworking stuff was discontinued by the time Rockwell bought them in 1956. They kept making lighter duty drill presses though. They also made a radial arm drill press that was very similar to their radial arm saw.Kearney and Trecker made full sized milling machines and Walker-Turner's well regarded drill presses were a good complement to them. The woodworking stuff fell away though. By the time Rockwell bought them, chiefly to give themselves a heavy duty line of drill presses, the Driver Line of smaller woodworking tools was long gone. Their 'lighter duty' machines were basically medium duty to everyone else. For example, their smallest bandsaw was 14 inches. Rockwell kept the division operating into the 1960s and their 15, 17, and 20 inch drill presses continued to be made under Rockwell into the 1970s basically unchanged.
>>2991997Lets talk about Craftsman. The most common of their early saws you will see are the top row in picture related. Notice the circular control knob at the front of the arm? They are okay machines for the time. Not good, not bad. Very middle of the road. No where near as good as a Walker-Turner, or even the industrial DeWalt/Rockwell models but better than their shitty models. That ain't saying much though. Pay special attention to the blade guard. That is how you know it was an earlier model. It is important.The dogshit models are by far the most common. Please take note that there is a black and aluminum 'early' model in the mix. See how the guard is different? That is when they started going to shit. It is a lighter casting then the original and it is a sign that everything else about the saw is cost cut also. Why does this matter? Two reason: accuracy and safety.All these lighter duty machines, just like all of the shitty lighter duty machines, flex more when you make cuts. This can throw off your cut but also makes the machine lose its 'zero'. What does that mean? Let say you need to make a bunch of miter cuts. You set the machine to the angles you need, double check them with a protractor (because you always measure twice before you cut), and start making cuts. After a few cuts something is off. You check the angles with a protractor again and the machine has 'moved'. All the set screws are still locked in, nothing actually 'moved', and yet now it is off. That is what happens with shitty machines. They whole fucking arm or column will flex and fuck everything up.What about safety? Well, remember how I said Sears had to recall all of their machines? Yeah, because their blade guards were dogshit and they refused to add new safety features as they became available. These are the machines that chiefly gave radial arm saws a bad name. It is best to just avoid any RAS was Craftsman or Emerson branding.
>>2991995> dewaltThat’s funny, i didn’t know dewalt used to be a real company
thx everyone.I guess I'd better take and post a pic of any RAS I'm thinking of getting, and wait a day.Or more likely just stick to chop saw and table saw.I used to work for a specialty contractor that had a nice mobile stand with "wings" for chop saw, and I had a Makitia table saw on factory stand and it just so happened to be a perfect height match to my old Warner folding ladder with a scaffolding plank for run off table.
>>2992019It is kinda sad. A lot of tool brands, baring a few exceptions, used to be real independent companies that made decent products in the USA. Stanley Black & Decker alone has something like a dozen brands they have gobbled up over the years that they don't even use anymore. That is on top of the 20 or so they are still using today. Blackhawk, North Bros/Yankee, Defiance, Russell Jennings, National Hand Tool, New Britain, Gage Tool Co., Van Dorn, and J.A Chapman were all different companies gobbled up by Stanley or Black & Decker over the years only to be taken out back and shot. 'Stanley' themselves was originally two different tool companies found by two men that were cousins that merged decades later.DeWalt is an interesting case and it actually survived much longer than most. They were purchased in 1960 and they didn't get the axe until 1988. Two executives at B&D bought the rights to the original radial arm saw designs when B&D wanted to shut down the operation. They formed the Lancaster Machinery Co. and used the DeWalt name for a short time. It reverted to B&D but I don't know the details of how or why. Lancaster Machinery folded up after about a year but some new owners picked up the rights and formed the Original Saw Co. They still make radial arm saws in the USA to the classic DeWalt design.
>>2992026Something to keep in mind is that the RAS was originally designed to be an industrial crosscutting tool at sawmills. It wasn't until the DeWalt ones started having the marketing department come up with a ton of crazy ways to use it, like setting the blade horizontal, at belly height, sticking out past the edge of the table and sliding a sheet of plywood through it. Or using it as a shaper.A lot of modern users actually spot weld theirs so they hold exactly at square. This channel does a lot of interesting joinery work and often uses an RAS: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Tmm5Xet7OJw
