Just this past weekend, there was a subdivision garage sale in my neigborhood...me and my girlfriend walked around for a while and I came across and old-school Craftsman !0" radial arm saw...The guy was asking $75 and I got it for $50...This will be an edition to my wood tools that I have been accumulating. it will be a nice compliment to my 10" table saw I already own...it works very well. I need to clean it up a bit, put on a new blade and fine tune the adjustments on it...It is HEAVY....It has to weigh over 200 lb. My table saw weighs about 250 lb....Lots of cast iron in both of these machines... Willy
Radial arm saws are really good for a lot of fast small cuts. There was a lot of times I'd wished I had one at the shop I worked at.
The thing I see it really being good at doing is when you make cross cuts on longer narrower boards. Especially if you needed to cut several pieces the same length. For example: making book cases where the sides are made out of 10" or 12" wide boards and you had to cut several of them to a length of 3 or 4 feet. You can set up a stop block and cut them all exactly to length. On a table saw you would have to mark the cuts and then run them through with a miter guage. If they were like 6' long 1x10's that you had to make 4' long, it would be trickier on a table saw... On the other hand ripping several pieces down to a narrow width is much much easier on the table saw....I have had a table saw for years and it is by far the most worked tool...I would not have gone out to seek a radial arm to buy new, but for 50 bucks I could not pass it up... Willy
