Radial arm saws are one of the most universal woodworking machines. With radial arm saws woodworker can cut bevels, miters, straight cross-cuts, rabbets and dadoes, form molding. Radial arm saws can even be used as horizontal drill. Also radial arm saws canserve as a guide for a router. Despite of all of that universality only few manufactures are building them.
The reason of this situation can be sound in one word: cost. A good and quality radial arm saws are quite expensive. Because of that, many woodworkers look on radial arm saws as on some kind of luxury. Also they occupied a quite large space in the workshop, and they arenot very portable. All this factors can prevent the average woodworker from purchasing the radial arm saws for their workshops.
Despite of such negative factors there is quite little quantity of woodworkers that purchased radial arm saw and were disappointed with it. The most part of experience woodworkers, used the radial arm saws, in one voice declared that this woodworking tool is invaluable for them and for their workshops.
However, as I already said, the number of different possible operations that can be made with radial arm saws are amazing. And this fact is stronger that all negative ones.
There is trade-off to all of this universality. For one, the radial arm saws are quite harder to set up cuts on the saw than some other tools.For instance, if you were cutting compound miters with radial arm saw, you’d be able to set up a compound miter saw much more quickly and consistently. If you were ripping stock with radial arm saw, a table saw is a much faster setup. However, if you will need to do the first, the second and the third, you`ll have to buy all tree kind of saws. But a radial-arm saw can handle all that tasks with ease, which gives considerable value to its hefty purchase price.
You can learn about the universality of radial arm saw and ways to incorporate this one of the most useful of woodworking tools into the workshop. You may begin to think that a radial-arm saw is a luxury you really can afford!
