All good points Larry and I have put some thought into them.

I was planning on adding a fence which will be tightened down with
wingnuts or something, through oblong holes, allowing for a certain
amount of freedom of alignment.

I was planning on making the saw arm parallel to the table top using
thin metal shim plates. The only reason to have it *dead* parallel is
when doing dados - I see Norm do that a lot but I wonder how much I
will.

Replacing the top is most problematic. I'll likely cut the "retired"
section out and lightly glue another into place. The hardboard sits
on a 3/4" ply sub-base. I've seen some more complex ideas (Shopnotes
#16) but I could go years without feeling the need to replace it.

Mike Brown

On Jun 2, 7:59 pm, Larry Kraus wrote:
wrote:
I just finished doing the same thing. Here are pictures of the
construction of the bench, mounting the metal frame and crafting a new
adjustment knob. Haven't done the final tuning yet and I don't know
how effective the dust collection will be.

http://www.mike-land.com/Woodworking...kbench/workben...

I looking at building a similar wall of cabinets incorporating my RAS,
possibly with flip up tables for my bench top planer and scroll saw.
Since I may want to rearrange the shop at some point I will probably
build individual cabinets with leveling adjusters. Like yours, some of
my inspiration came from Norm's workstation.

I hate to mention this now, since I can see you have a lot of work
invested in your bench, but I can see problems with it for RAS use.

Where is the fence? To use a RAS safely you have to have a solidly
mounted fence, which can be easily shifted and replaced, and which
will maintain alignment with respect to the saw arm.

Mounting the saw base directly to the table top means that you have no
way to align the top parallel to the saw arm.

The top surface of a RAS table should be considered sacrificial, as
the blade has to cut into it in order to cut through the work piece.
Replacing yours looks kind of involved, and putting another piece on
top means you lose the benefit of a long uninterrupted top.

It has been a while since I watched my tape of norm's project, but I
think he left the RAS on its own base, and aligned the workstation
with the saw...
Hmm... didn't he extend the fence onto the workstation? How did that
work?
Guess I'll have to find that tape...