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A view on alignment of the shopsmith.

Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2020 7:19 pm
by reible
I'm pretty persnickety when it comes to alignment and I don't really know if that is a good thing or not. I have spent the money to buy a master plate, you can see that here:

http://mastergage.com/display_product.asp?id=4

They claim .003" in both flatness and parallelism. You mount it on the saw arbor much like you would a blade. I've tested by flipping it end for end without moving anything else and found mine to be pretty much right on. An error of .003" would have shown up but I had no way of going much more then .0015" at the time I did the testing. Now I could go to .001 but don't see the point of doing that.

So you still have any errors caused by the internals of the shopsmith, ie the quill run out or bearing issues but for now we can pretty much says we don't have a better way of getting an accurate plane for that direction. It gives us a place to work from to do the alignment of the miter slots and to check the table is at 90 degrees to the plane. BTW I do this with out the insert in place so the square sets on the table and against the plate.

For squareness I have my Woodpecker 1281. I trust this much more the an angle cube or angle gauge. See details here:

https://www.woodpeck.com/woodpeckers-pr ... x-261.html

At some point it is also advisable to check just how flat your main table is. We have seen some pretty wild anomalies posted here! If you are in the norm then you should have a pretty flat table. Just make sure you don't have dips or rises where you are adjusting for the 90 degrees. For flatness I have the woodpecker SERX-24, you can see that here:

https://www.woodpeck.com/serx-straight-edge-rule.html

You will also need some feeler gauges, I have several sets and I trust all of them so I like to use this one:

https://www.leevalley.com/en-ca/shop/to ... em=86K9901

To adjust the rip fence to the miter slot I have the woodpecker saw gauge. I have the first version shown here:

https://www.woodpeck.com/woodpeckers-saw-gauge.html

This is designed to take the width errors into account when placed in the miter slot. I have measured some larger then expected errors when I was try to do this alignment with the shopsmith gauge. Don't know if that was manufacturing tolerances or wear but having to shim the part that fits in the track was not going to win any accuracy.

Even after spending this much money and taking the time to get things about as perfect as I could it was very evident that had I actually gotten things to be .000" by using the tools at hand I still wouldn't really know how far off things were, cause each part has some variance. I do shoot for a zero tolerance between the miter slot and the master plate. Then since I use the rip fence to the left I try to have the far side slightly off, .005" maximum. Often you can get less then that.

Now comes the burn. Lean on the main table................

So about enough for now. Hope this gave you some things to think about.

Ed

Re: A view on alignment of the shopsmith.

Posted: Sun Dec 13, 2020 3:34 pm
by Ed in Tampa
To quote Ed Reible above
“ Now comes the burn. Lean on the main table..........”

AMEN! I am convinced that you can align the Shopsmith to .0001 tolerance and then lay your hand on the table and completely change the alignment. Further while I many of you may question my craftsmanship I could never blame the Shopsmith for any inaccuracies or flaws.

Re: A view on alignment of the shopsmith.

Posted: Mon Dec 14, 2020 8:39 am
by RFGuy
Ed,

Thanks for this post. I also have the Woodpeckers Saw Gauge 1.0 and a MasterPlate. I tried them before, but was quite disappointed in the results. Admittedly it could be user error. What I dislike about my Saw Gauge 1.0 is that I can't get it to work right as intended. It is meant for the common tablesaw miter slot that has a flat clean bottom. Unfortunately, my Mark V (510/520) table does not. There are these step ledges in the corners of the Shopsmith miter slots. The Saw Gauge 1.0 is meant to ride on a large round pivot that sits on top of 2 round steel pins with the intent of keeping the Saw Gauge at the center of the miter slot at all times. Trying this on my Mark V table resulted in it not moving smoothly front to back. In fact, the only way I could get it to work, as intended, was to use just one of the round steel pins on just one side. Using this technique, I measured +/- 0.015" over the length of the MasterPlate. In other words, my measurements were about 10x worse than what you report here. Of course this doesn't make sense because I am just measuring miter slot to MasterPlate so this should be just the surface flatness of the plate combined with the variability of the miter slot machining. I would appreciate any feedback that you have on how you got the Saw Gauge 1.0 to work on a Mark V table, or any other suggestions for what I am doing wrong.
reible wrote: Sat Dec 12, 2020 7:19 pm
Now comes the burn. Lean on the main table................
Yeah, this is what I complained about in a previous post. When using just the main table alone there is too much flex and I wish the trunnions and legs were stiffer. The solution is to put connector tubes through to the auxiliary table but that is a lot of hassle for those of us who have and use one Mark V for everything in our shop and just need to make a quick cut in between other operations...

Re: A view on alignment of the shopsmith.

Posted: Mon Dec 14, 2020 1:08 pm
by reible
OK lets address the Saw Gauge. The issue I have had is with the two bars wanting to fall into the indent in the miter track. They need to be touching the sides/bottom of the track right at the corner. One always seems to drop into the center section like this:
sg1.jpg
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So I use a straw to hold them sort of in position, like this:
sg2.jpg
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This allows you to put the other bar in place like this:
sg3.jpg
sg3.jpg (236.01 KiB) Viewed 2490 times
I then check by looking down the track like this:
sg4.jpg
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I have no issues with them sliding in the track. You do need to keep a downward pressure on the gauge the whole way.

Ed

Re: A view on alignment of the shopsmith.

Posted: Mon Dec 14, 2020 1:14 pm
by reible
Here is a post from back in 2007 that some of you might remember and for other this might be new stuff.

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=789&p=6177&hilit=4+legs#p6177

You will notice how the system tries to come back to original location after....... but if you have a heavy piece that you are working on it will deflect the system while it being worked on.

Anyway when you work in thousands of an inch it doesn't take much to effect changes.

Ed

Re: A view on alignment of the shopsmith.

Posted: Mon Dec 14, 2020 3:05 pm
by RFGuy
Ed,

Thanks. I really appreciate it. Using a straw is a really good suggestion and hopefully will solve my problem. Without using both roll pins, I am sure I am just measuring some play that I am introducing while sliding it back and forth. I am letting one of my kids try to turn their first bowl while home from college, so I cannot try it yet. As soon as they are done, I will try with the Saw Gauge and MasterPlate again.

Re: A view on alignment of the shopsmith.

Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2021 10:48 am
by RFGuy
Thanks Ed. I finally got around to looking at this again...was stuck in lathe mode for quite a while. So, using this straw trick with my Woodpeckers Saw Gauge 1.0 yielded +/-0.006 across the entire front of my MasterPlate mounted on the arbor. This was without connector tubes in the main table. When I inserted connector tubes from the main table to the aux table and locked them down, I measured +/-0.003 across the MasterPlate. Still seems kind of high to me, but I can't find definitive specs on flatness for the MasterPlate. Any feedback on this?

Re: A view on alignment of the shopsmith.

Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2021 11:47 am
by JPG
HIGH ?????? :rolleyes:

Re: A view on alignment of the shopsmith.

Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2021 12:01 pm
by dusty
I have none of the neat gadgets from Woodpecker and Master Plate but I can still align my tables to the blade with more than sufficient accuracy and repeatability. I saw the Woodpecker approach when Ed first posted about this a long time ago. I liked it because what I had was not repeatable. I had to hold the setup firm against the miter slot to get repeatability.

I solved my problem by using hardware that I had including two used bandsaw bearings. If the pictures leave questions just shout out but here is my solution in pictures.
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Re: A view on alignment of the shopsmith.

Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2021 12:13 pm
by dusty
Looking at this again, I am going to make a slight change to my two gauges. Rather than use the bearings shown here, I am going to change to the two wider bandsaw bearings (if I have them in the "to not discard" drawer).