Shopsmith Forums

I have a 520 that was manufactured in 2005, and its idler shaft is slightly oversized. To compensate, Shopsmith bored the ID of mating hub slightly oversized. We never did figure out why my machine has the oddball parts, but all the raw data still lives in this thread.

That sounds like a great plan, Chris. If I had to downsize, my 520 would be the last machine in my shop.

Making the 10ER an office showpiece is absolutely brilliant! I have one with all the accessories, including a few rare ones, but really have no room in my workshop for it, and little actual ...

I have to wonder if the straightness and squareness issues you're measuring are really due to damage, or to normal dimensional variations in extrusions. My 520 fence isn't precision-machined, it's just an aluminum extrusion that has been cut to length.

I just checked my own 520 fence with a 24 ...

So here's my question: How do I get each tenon "perfectly" sized with the first cuts?


That's a very interesting question. Holding a couple thousandths tolerance on a Shopsmith is one heckuva challenge. I usually shoot for 0.005", and sometimes settle for 0.010", for which a lot of folks think ...

Since the quill has a sliding fit in the headstock, it has to have at least some radial clearance. Which leads to a little bit of radial "play". As for whether 1/16" at 10" out is excessive on a Shopsmith, I'l let others weigh in.

You can probably reduce the radial play by judiciously tightening ...

Shopsmith has sold a lot of Nova G3 chucks, manufactured by Technatool. I have one, and it’s a nice chuck, but I don’t recall any branding marks on the chuck itself. A Google search should turn up plenty of photos that you can compare to your chuck.

To my knowledge, Shopsmith never sold any machine ...

YMMV but I know I could rip that easily on my Shopsmith bandsaw with a sharp 5/8 blade and proper tension and probably not even have to sand them. I ripped huge long boards into 1/4" strips for my cedar strip canoe on my bandsaw with no drift (or more accurately I had set the fence to correct for ...

I feel the same as you. With the "heel" of the fence straddler all the way at one side of the workpiece, it's applying a "yaw" torque to the workpiece as you push. Once the workpiece is beyond the featherboard, I don't trust the slippery plastic bottom edge of the straddler to reliably counteract ...

I thought that the NEMA ratings on plugs and receptacles were just that "ratings". In other words, they specify max voltage and amperage, but they don't explicitly indicate the intended application.


I researched this a little more. It turns out that I was apparently wrong about the NEC ...

I believe that the NEC requires that plugs and receptacles be used in accordance with their NEMA ratings. But I have no idea where my old copy of the NEC is, so I Googled it. Here's what the AI summary says:

In the National Electrical Code (NEC), the requirement that plugs and receptacles be ...