I know that this seems to be a pretty obvious statement; at least to anyone who has aligned the main table more than one or two times but it sure screwed me up and wasted a lot of my time.
I've spent a lot of time, recently, working on alignments as a possible cause for some unusual table saw performance. I am now convinced that alignment was not the root cause of my problems.
After doing a meticulous alignment of the main table and getting it to within +- .002", I returned to making sawdust. Then I noticed that one of my floating tables was out of alignment (tables were not all at same height).
Rather than do just one, I decided to check them all. With the 5' tubes installed and all my extension and floating tables mounted, I proceeded to check table heights. That done, I went back to normal operations but when I setup, I had the main table connected to the right hand extension table (headstock moved to the right side).
For no real good reason, I checked table alignment to the blade. It was what I consider to be "way off". It was off .009" even though I had recently aligned it to within .002".
To fix this, I had to remove the tubes that were connecting the main table to the extension table.
A check of table alignment, with the tubes removed, was "right on". The main table is not out of alignment at all, except when connected to the extension table.
Obviously, when I was doing the auxillary table alignments, I introduced a situation that pulled the main table out of alignment. Now I must determine what I have done wrong.
The one thing I know is that the main table is fine and the alignment of the main is basis for all other table alignments.
I suspect that I used my one bent 5' tube to do the alignment on the extension tables.
