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Interesting, isn’t it. It looks to me like he might have tried upgrading it, put a big meaty bed on it and a plate on the back to strengthen up the gantry. It seems to have one access with an upgraded ball screw, but the other two axis are not. For some reason he stopped upgrading it. Here’s...

Very nice Steve. The thing I really, ideally want to be able to do is to cut plane blades out of O1 tool steel. Damn things take me ages to make by manual milling machine. Annealed O1 is only 30% harder than brass, as long as it doesn’t work harden! What do you think of this one? Too...

Hi Steve The spindle will be the first upgrade. For the most part I’ll be cutting shapes out of and engraving brass and ideally O1 if I can do it. I used the free version of Onshape for a while, but I’ll be needing CAM so I recently switched to FreeCAD. The learning curve is very, very steep...

Thanks Ollie The reason I was looking at the Foxalien Vasto is that it has the ball screws/ linear rails etc and this seems like a good start. It seems like the manufacturers are listening and there’s a lot of competition that seems to be driving improvements. However the rigidity is likely to...

Morning Reading some of the previous posts, it sounds as though there are some people on here who do know about CNC, so I may as well ask! I am looking to buy a small, budget, CNC router for engraving and milling brass. Basically I want to engrave some small brass plates and cut them out of a...

You’ll need something bigger between centres than a typical mini lathe or myford for that won’t you? There look to be a few companies out there who sell spares for record vices.

I think, on balance, my fence is robust. It’s a chunk of cast iron. It’s the rail that’s the problem. If (only if) I extend the fence, and I think I have to, the lever arm on the longer fence is enough to slightly distort the guide rail - only by a tiny amount, but if the fence is longer it can...

Not a bad idea, wood is a lot cheaper than angle iron, and arguably has dampening properties. Typically I’ve made them from steel, very solid, very heavy. The crazy thing is the amount of angle iron it takes. 6 x width + 6 x length + 4 x height. Add the steel shelves and it weighs a lot. My...

Where is the gap between the blade and wedge too big? At the top of the mortise at the front? These wedges are a bit counterintuitive. They don’t work in the obvious way. There are 3 points of pressure for a rabbet plane wedge. 1) at the back at the top against the tang 2) at the front at the...

Well thanks for all the suggestions but I think for now I’ve talked myself out of changing it, for a while anyway. I’ve improved the vibration a lot, sorted out a lot of the backlash, and found ways to get around the tilting table challenges more safely. I’ve ordered some lovely BSW set screws...

It’s an interesting idea @Jacob. I will give it a go. In the past I’ve used sticky sandpaper stuck to my table saw table, or spray glue on an old cast iron surface plate that I never really managed to get off. Sticky sandpaper is expensive and remarkably hard to find (when I looked). The...

Fair enough, I have never owned one, the video of the Laguna I was watching this morning showed theirs tilting to the right so I assumed they all did!

@Jacob actually rethinking it you might be onto something. You can see from this pic why the left side of the fence doesn’t work. The 2nd and third cuts are inaccessible. On the right side of the blade, you can see how the cuts work. However, it’s the first cut with the high blade, thats...

Good thought, I had the same one. Sadly, it doesn’t work. The fence will indeed go to the left side of the blade. But the blade is then pointing in the wrong direction for the cuts I need to make. I’d have to draw a diagram to explain and you’d see what I mean.

I think that’s likely in my case.

Thanks for all the nuggets of advice, very helpful. I have fixed the vertical blade movement problem on the saw. I’ve improved the vibration and I’m sure I can improve it further. Looking at modern saws, the trunnions are attached to the table these days, rather than the chassis. That seems a...

Window shopping and they all have “wings”. They are gigantic. Are there any small ones?

Get some engineers blue or possibly a sharpie pen and find out where the high spots are. Don’t move on to the next grade until they are all gone. Wet sandpaper won’t make this easy. I stick my sandpaper to my table saw table and do it skewed at about 45 deg.

Not really but if a large shiny new table saw turned up she would probably notice

let’s imagine that I did get a new one, budget around £1000. Requirements - accurate, compact, flexible. What would people recommend?