On 17 Apr 2006 16:00:51 -0700, "Tanus" wrote:

As charlie said, knowledge is power, and I'm beginning to think that
this saw might be more trouble than it's worth. However, I can't afford
a new one ATM, so I'm going to fiddle with it and see if I can hinge
the assembly or at least make removal and reattachment an easier task.

It is possible to build your own overhead guard, you know. That's
what I did when I got tired of pulling my table-mounted guard off the
saw. I looked at a lot of the commercially available ones and then
some of the DIY plans and put together something that I've been very
happy with.

I specifically wanted a guard that I could use no matter what cut I
was doing, so it's extra-wide to allow for both stacked dado heads and
tilted blades. I keep a splitter mounted in my table inserts as much
as possible, although obviously with tilted and dado cuts, that's not
possible and it can be removed and reinserted in seconds.

Mine looks sort of like the one in this DIY guide I found:

http://www.woodcentral.com/bparticles/blade_guard.pdf

It's ceiling-mounted on t-track guides so that I can move it side to
side if necessary, and the whole assembly is on a single piece that
can be taken down and re-attached to the rafters if I have to move the
saw. The biggest difference that I can see is that I removed the
pawls that came with my original guard and installed them into the new
overhead guard on a threaded rod. If I don't need them, I have small
pins that I can push them over inside the guard so they don't hang
down and impede the work.

These things really don't cost a lot and they provide a degree of
safety no matter what kind of cuts you're making. I think the only
time I don't use the guard at all is when I'm doing vertical cuts and
panel raising, but there's no guard on the planet you could do that
with.