A Brief History of the Sawsmith Radial Arm Saw
(copied and pasted from http://sawsmith-tool-hunter.blogspot.com/)
Serial numbers referenced on
http://www.shopsmith.com/ownersite/faq/radialarmsaw.htm indicate the first Sawsmith radial arm saw was introduced in December 1957 by Magna Engineering of Menlo Park California. (Some references mention “Magna Power Tool Corp.”). Magna Engineering was founded by a partnership of Hans Goldschmidt, the inventor of the first Shopsmith multi-purpose tool the 10ER, and brothers Frank and Robert Chambers.
Yuba was a HUGE conglomerate that started during the San Francisco gold rush in the 1800’s. After operating successfully all those years, in 1957 Yuba's directors were warned that by the late 1960s the company's long-profitable gold fields would peter out. Hoping to diversify the company (then called Yuba Consolidated Gold Fields), started buying-up companies like a rich drunken sailor. Yuba was already manufacturing a line of garden tillers and was looking for a line of items that could fill the slow winter months. Woodworking was more of a winter activity, so the Shopsmith line looked like the perfect match. Early in 1958 Magna Engineering merged with Yuba Consolidated Industries. Goldschmidt headed Yuba's engineering efforts until 1960, then left to operate his own toy and game design company.
Things went very bad for Yuba. According to a March 1962 Time Magazine article titled “How Not To Grow“, the wild spending on poorly managed companies left Yuba bankrupt. By 1961 a group of former employees of Yuba formed the company Magna American, and these folks went on to produce the Sawsmith, Mark VII and several garden tools including tillers until they too ran into trouble. By 1965 the last Sawsmith left the Magna plant, and the tools went into storage.
In 1972 John Folkerth, a stock broker in Dayton, Ohio, purchased a Sawsmith from a widow friend of his mother, and when he went on a search for a replacement blade for it he instead found the tooling that Magna had in storage. John spent some time raising funds and purchased the tooling for the entire Shopsmith and Sawsmith line and moved it to Dayton, Ohio.
The rest of the story that I’ve never seen in print is despite such statements in old Shopsmith Inc. literature that “Shopsmith still owns the tooling for the Sawsmith and that they could one day revive the tool“; the truth is it was determined years ago that the Sawsmith would be too difficult to sell in our lawsuit-happy country, so the tooling was sold for scrap.
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Excerpt from the eBay Buying Guide "Finding Hidden Shopsmith Tools, Aftermarket Accessories"
(http://www.ebay.com/gds/Finding-Hidden-Shopsmith-Tools-Aftermarket-Accessories/10000000000939276/g.html)
In the late 1950’s Magna and the ShopSmith line was purchased by the lawn and garden tool manufacturer Yuba Power Products, Inc. of Cleveland, Ohio. Within just a few years a group of employees incorporated as Magna American Corp. and acquired the ShopSmith product line from Yuba, but by 1966 the company and the ShopSmith product line died. All told the ShopSmith line had been moved from San Diego, CA to Fort Wayne, IN, to Menlo Park, CA, to Cincinnati, OH, and ultimately to what was to be its final resting place, Raymond, MS. What a wild ride!
But then something unexpected happened. A Dayton, Ohio stockbroker named John Folkerth, at the urging of his mother, purchased a SawSmith RAS from a widowed friend. On a quest for a replacement saw blade John ended-up in Mississippi at the all but deceased Magna America, where he found not only the blade, but also the tooling to produce the entire Shopsmith tool line and boxes of unanswered mail with orders for parts that included un-cashed checks! In 1972 with investors to back him Mr. Folkerth formed Shopsmith Inc. to resume manufacturing with all the original equipment purchased from Magna. An interesting point to remember is that from 1947 to 1972 the name ShopSmith was the brand name of a line of tools, not the name of a company. This all changed in 1972 when John chose to embrace the ShopSmith line as the entire focus of his new company.
The tooling was moved to Troy, Ohio with the original plan being to produce spare parts for all the old Magna and Yuba ShopSmith brand tools, but before long they realized that there was no need to just sell parts, they could also assemble the parts and sell complete tools! They chose to focus on the most popular and robust 5-in-1 tool, the Mark V.
