A Kluged, Improved Table Saw

or "How I stopped coveting 5 HP tablesaws and learned to love the little one I already had"

After my wife and I got married, we purchased and moved into our first house. I started out with a standard Ryobi BT3000SX, purchased from Home Depot after looking at several sub-$500 table saws. Two friends of mine had purchased one a few years before me, and both were very happy with their decision.

I used the saw for a few remodeling projects. I read maybe 5 pages of the manual, and didn't use dust collection at all. After awhile, I got a pair of the accessory wheels, which made moving the saw around a bit easier. I once took the dust cover/splitter off to cut a rabbet, and never put it back on. 

We sold that house and found a bigger one in a nicer neighborhood. It was another fix-er-upper. I figured the Ryobi would get more use there, and it did. We put in tongue and groove hardware floors ourselves,  completely remodeled the kitchen, and cut through lots of douglas fir, hard maple, jatoba (brazilian cherry), ipe, MDF, and various other materials. I found that keeping the blade clean and sharp really helped. The accessory table was put to good use with an extra router semi-permanently attached. I found that I really enjoyed this woodworking thing! I even made an entryway bench out of some scrap maple stair tread, my first piece of "real" furniture. 

The garage/workshop area gradually filled up with more tools-miter saw, another router, various other hand tools. I subscribed to a woodworking magazine, and started getting catalogs from all sorts of places. I coveted the Jet and Delta cabinet saws, but at $1500 or so, they seemed out of reach, and a planer, drill press, and band saw were now on my wish list.

I got a copy of Wood Magazine's Best-Ever Workshops, chock full of projects that I could make myself. Inspired, I started out by making a new rolling stand for my table saw. That really helped, I was able to set up much faster, and some of the saw accessories and jigs I'd accumulated or made had a new home. I still coveted those cabinet saws, however, but my wife liked the idea of using a two car garage as a two car garage, at least in between projects, so anything I did had to be very mobile. Those big cabinet saws would take up a lot of room.

Then I discovered www.ryobitools.com, which led me to www.samconder.com.  When I discovered that an extra set of rails could be retrofitted to my tool, a little light bulb went off. Roy Shrove's "doublewide" became my new inspiration. I could have that bigger work surface without going to the home finance committee. After lurking at the Ryobi forum for awhile, reading everything posted for months preceding, and studying the work of guys like "Dave in Cairns", jigs made by Rod Kirby, the considered musings of "Norm in Fujino", and the ingenious after market accessories from the "LeeMaid factory", I was a certified, reborn, Ryobi Sicko Cult Member. 

A 2nd-generation tablesaw was made, which I dubbed "Gugensaw", after Brian Pacholka posted to the forum pictures of his genetically altered, two-saw creature named "Frankensaw". I purchased an extra set of rails from someone at the forum, a chipped kitchen countertop section from the local big box hardware store for $10, and used some extra flooring and other scrap wood from previous projects to convert my small roll around cabinet into a wide tablesaw. The double length made more it stable than the single-wide cabinet. 

I was using the saw so much that, even though I religiously used my shop vac to suck up the dust I was making from all my remodel projects, my wife started complaining about all of the stuff I was tracking into the house.. I'd been cutting lots of MDF, and a lot of the fine dust never made it into the "pan" of the tablesaw. An overhead dust collector design was made from some online plans, which cost a bit due to the lengthy hard maple purchased. In addition, a higher volume cyclone dust collection system was made to handle the upper and lower suction.

Moving my saw around one day I heard a crack. The saw wouldn't move. My very experimental setup failed at a joint. I dragged my "sled" into rough position, and finished they current project. Some dissatisfaction with that setup included lack of stiffness between the saw and the extension table, lack of storage, and although I had very good dust pickup, allergies required almost perfect collection. I needed this thing to be extremely mobile so I could pull it out, use it, and push it back very easily. I wanted a dedicated router station, but didn't have room for one, so it would be great to add this to my table. And another thing-I wanted to incorporate every single great idea I'd seen posted online for this great "little" saw.

So to the drawing board I went. Some sketches, a list of features, some things just in the back of my mind. I wanted to keep down cost, and since I'd had so much help from online postings, I took lots of pics for future documentation. Herein is my 3rd generation wide table Ryobi table saw, hereby christened "Klugensaw".