Table saw sliding carriage or not??

[ELMo Rippington]

Hello
I am a cabinet/furniture maker.
I have been made redundant from the place I worked and am starting up my own shop with the redundancy package plus an extra loan.

The thing is...
I was absolutely spoiled in my last shop and had everything you could ever want from a 4 sider, full size panel saw and huge drum sander...

So when designing my shop to make mainly kitchens/cabinetry but also furniture the first thing I think of is table saw, sliding carriage.
But my workshop is 9 metres long from the double doors and 4.3 metres wide.
So a full size saw would take up WAY too much room.

Basically I’m torn between getting a smaller saw with a 900 rip capacity and a 1600 sliding carriage and scoring blade which will still take up a fair chunk of space. But I only have to use my tracksaw to get a leading edge and I’m off onto the saw.

Or I see the what I call “American” setups where they have just a cabinet saw on the side of the assembly table and have a router table all on the same platform.
The space I would save would be great and I could use that for assembly, plus I would have more space at the end which I could partition off for a little spray bay. But the way I have learnt and always worked is so reliant on the sliding carriage. So once you have ripped a sheet this way I’m guessing you just rough them out to length so you can size them down and do everything from the rip fence?

While I’m super aware I could make kitchens without a table saw at all really I’m just wandering how you guys would go about it as I’m guessing a lot of you have much more experience than I do in working in smaller spaces without all the kit.

Any advice is very much appreciated

 

[Inspector]

I have never used one but a panel saw might be the ticket for sheet goods, if you can find one at a price you can afford. You would probably still need a cabinet saw too.

Pete

 

[ELMo Rippington]

Thanks Pete
So why would you still need a cabinet saw as well? I can see it would be handy if you could use a dado with it and maybe another mitre slot on the right of the blade but other than that what could you do with it that you couldn’t on the table saw?

 

[doctor Bob]

I think the space is too small for a sliding saw. However it's catch 22 as I couldn't imagine making kitchens without a sliding panel saw. If their is anyway of fitting one in then go for it, even if you have to put all other machines on wheels.
By the way, The biggest killer when making kitchens is storing them.
Building works are notorious for being delayed, we often end up storing 3-4 kitchens which take up a lot of space.

 

[Sideways]

Tim Wilmots in Belgium has retired from full time woodworking to take over his father's farm but his last workshop looked spectacular to me. Tim makes use of a large slider but also a tracksaw and lots of other Festool gear. I wonder if watching the series of videos about his system workshop will give you ideas about flow and efficiency. It made me lust after a full size slider but if just the initial breakdown of full sheets could be done by tracksaw, you may find that a shorter slider will do most of the job in less space.
I'd be curious if you as a professional woodworker find anything new in those videos.
https://benchworks.be/en/my-projects/system-workshop/

 

[ELMo Rippington]

Thanks a lot
Yeah I’m defo leaning more towards just getting one in, it kinda dominating the space but it’s my main tool so il deal with it. Was looking at a SCM SC4 and another Felder model. Only a 1.6 or 2.0 carriage but as long as I can crosscut a sheet I’m good I recon.
That’s a damn good point on the storage front. I had thought about it a bit as we used to have the same problem where I worked sometimes. I’m mainly aiming for smaller kitchens But obviously wouldn’t be able to turn down a biggun. I would just have to rent storage or maybe write storage costs into the contract maybe...

 

[ELMo Rippington]

Tim Wilmots in Belgium has retired from full time woodworking to take over his father's farm but his last workshop looked spectacular to me. Tim makes use of a large slider but also a tracksaw and lots of other Festool gear. I wonder if watching the series of videos about his system workshop will give you ideas about flow and efficiency. It made me lust after a full size slider but if just the initial breakdown of full sheets could be done by tracksaw, you may find that a shorter slider will do most of the job in less space.
I'd be curious if you as a professional woodworker find anything new in those videos.
https://benchworks.be/en/my-projects/system-workshop/

Nice one, will have a look at that link in the morning

 

[Jonathan S]

Making kitchens without a slider is hard work......that's how I started, with the American set up.
I would go for a 900 rip and 2500 slider and then work around the saw.....if you need a spindle the saw /spindle combo machines will save space, but not time.

As Bob said you need storage space, this year I had a large one sitting in the shop for 5 months.....

Sent from my SM-J530F using Tapatalk

 

[ELMo Rippington]

Making kitchens without a slider is hard work......that's how I started, with the American set up.
I would go for a 900 rip and 2500 slider and then work around the saw.....if you need a spindle the saw /spindle combo machines will save space, but not time.

As Bob said you need storage space, this year I had a large one sitting in the shop for 5 months.....

Sent from my SM-J530F using Tapatalk

Thanks Jonathan
Il take all of that on board.
Defo a sliding carriage then. Basically I need more space as we all do but as it stands I own my workshop outright so have no overheads, plus it’s on my property so I can always nip out in the evenings to spray another coat of paint.

As for storage I’m just going to have to cross that bridge when I come to it, may end up buying a small container or something. The jobs I have lined up for the 4 months when I start are me going in, taking out and installing plus I simply can’t afford to do everything off the bat. There is a workshop down here I spoke to about some sunny work for any dry patches and they said they just rent a storage unit.
I just don’t get how people manage to make kitchens and wardrobes without a slider, just using a tracksaw efficiently. I guess it takes longer but their startup costs are way lower so they are in profit much faster?

 

[ELMo Rippington]

Also sideways
That guys workshop is pretty damn cool!
Really like the clamping rail system he’s got and that whole area in general.
However the budget is so huge it’s not very relatable to myself. I mean, the guy has a damn forklift! I worked in a shop with 13 of us producing and we didn’t even have a forklift
The other thing for me is the bench isn’t big enough. I have always used a full sheet as my bench top and I use every mm of it I used to have a bench with a full sheet and an extra 400mm on the end and that was even better.

Thanks for sending me the link, was useful

 

[Hornbeam]

My workshop is too small for my saw but I have it set up so I can open the roller shutter and then handle 8 X 4 with the door open. Not great in the winter. One other thought is that quite a lot of boards are also in 10 X 5 so even bigger. I also use a hand held circular and long straight edge set up for cutting boards into more manageable sizes. Go for the 2500 table or 1250 as anything in between is neither one thing or the other
Ian

 

[HOJ]

My first instinct would be to see how things pan out in the short term, could you manage without a Slider? to make a big financial hit early on, and on the back of already being made redundant, may be premature, what happened to the company you worked for, and are you picking up work from them?

My workshop is linear, 14m X 4.1M, I have a Sedgwick saw with a sliding carriage, but have taken it off as it is too intrusive, my current set up, with the use of track saws and an MFT has made my space, in my view, efficient.

My process has become linear in its own right, and doesn't impede very much on my general work space, I can also to an extent, take this set up to site if I'm making fitted units.

 

[MikeK]

But my workshop is 9 metres long from the double doors and 4.3 metres wide.
So a full size saw would take up WAY too much room.

I am a hobbyist and don't make any money from my woodworking hobby, so take my comments with that in mind. My basement is 10x5 meters, with no external entrance, and my shop is a walled-off portion of that at about 5x5 meters. I wanted a U.S.-style cabinet saw, but none were available here. The smallest format table saw I could find was the Hammer K3 Basic, but the lead time was 90-120 days. In addition, I would have to make my own arrangements for shipping, installation, and commissioning.

I bought a SCM (Minimax) SC2 Classic from a local distributor who had one in stock. The price was about the same as the Hammer K3, but the price included delivery, installation, and commissioning. Since this was a point of sale purchase, unlike the Hammer, I could take advantage of my NATO status and not pay the 19-percent VAT. Originally, commissioning was a separate expense, but the distributor decided to include it in the purchase price.

The saw does dominate my shop space, but I can use the other part of the basement for assembly as required. Although I cannot rip a full sheet of plywood on the SC2, I can crosscut full sheets with no problem. The limitation on ripping is not the saw, but the width of my shop. I have a track saw for ripping anything longer than 2 meters and use my garage for this.

SCM makes a smaller slider saw, the SC1, but the distributor did not have one in stock and the lead time would be about the same as the Hammer K3. The SC1 has a smaller diameter blade and doesn't have the option for a scoring blade, so I chose the SC2 Classic.

 

[doctor Bob]

Whatever you decide, good luck.If you make it through the next year in this current environment then the journey will be a doodle ........... as a business owner it's a very worrying period.

 

[AJB Temple]

I would caution anyone investing in kit now, or relying on orders placed or "promised" pre-Co19 to be wary. Many customers will cancel orders as they re-arrange priorities, and money is going to be tight. Replacing kitchens is a big cost for many people, and I would expect a lot of this kind of work to be shelved for a year or two.

In a smallish space, and for the first year, I would minimise all spending and make do with a track saw.

Also, some suppliers of kit may well go bust or be forced to cut prices drastically to generate cash flow. Demand will be low as businesses in trouble do not spend on capital gear. Chinesium stuff on the other hand may dry up, which could signal trouble for people like Axminster and Record.

Get your workshop ready. Keep in touch with your customers, and hold tight to your cash.

 

[ELMo Rippington]

Thanks to all of you for all the helpful advice. Starting to sway towards a smaller saw with slider on my bench.
To the guy above, the place I worked at was called Winfrey’s and it went under for reasons I wouldn’t share with others.
They did however pass over customers.

In regards to machine orders, customers response and setting up. While I appreciate the time and thought spent on the posts and that you guys are understandably worried about your own businesses. This post was only intended to be a machine query.
It’s never a good time to start a business and while I’m well aware of the issues incurred by this virus I’m also aware of the opportunity.
Many thanks

 

[deema]

There are a few approaches which I’ve taken for making kitchens. Initially I’ve bought all the sheet material cut to size, and just assembled the stuff, this is incredibly efficient especially in a small space. However, you lose out on price as opposed to buying packs of material. For small kitchens the price disadvantage probably isn’t too bad, if they are high end.

The other option which again I’ve done, is to find a supplier of really decent cabinets. Most kitchen are fairly standard with only a few cabinets requiring to be truly bespoke. This I’ve found to be one of the cheapest ways of producing middle range kitchens. You make the drawer and door fronts and the odd cabinet. It also cuts down on the need to store kitchens for delayed projects.

Finally there is my solution for a table / sliding saw. The chances are you will get involved in most forms of joinery not just cabinet making.....so a universal saw is ideal. It’s a compromise, undoubtedly. However, after a lot of thought and looking around I decided to buy a L’invincible SCM SI15F. It’s no longer made, but is IMO the best made saw for its size. Its not much larger than a table saw, has a full 50” cut cast iron slider with scriber. Its capable of ripping 5 1/2” and is built to be dropped from 1000ft and still be completely serviceable. Compromises, well it weighs close to 1 tonne, so you don’t move it! The slider does not run up to the blade. Availability, they are difficult to find secondhand.
I’ve made a simple sled that fits into the massive dovetail on the slider that allows me to cut right up the blade any size of panel I want, with the ability to remove it when not in use. Hammer / Felder have something similar that can be fitted to their saw of similar size / capability at a cost. It works in conjunction with the sliding table.

 

[pollys13]

L’invincible SCM SI15F for anyone who might be interested in this saw. Is photo and quite a lot of info on it, like a few things to watch out for if buying second hand. Great condition, little use and £1000.
https://www.gumtree.com/p/power-saws/sc ... 1287471107

I see another on Gumtree but a couple of year ago, doubt if dealer would still have around, taking up space...... but you never know. Was listed on Ebay £650 unsold, can see Ebay seller and has current listings, so could message him and ask if happens to still have the saw.

https://picclick.co.uk/SCM-L%E2%80%99In ... 65596.html

 

[ELMo Rippington]

Thanks deema and pollys13
That’s a pretty damn comprehensive comment.
I did think about ordering in the stuff cut to size as I have a friend in London who does just that and has great results. I think they charge something like 30p a cut? However I’m way down at the bottom of the country so the company’s that offer the service are not close at all and charge way too much in my opinion. I would be paying more per cut plus I can get the sheets so much cheaper from NWT or another trade to trade company.
That’s a really good looking saw actually. I’ve been looking at the SCM minimax SCC2 lately. I saw one in a showroom though and thought the outrigger was a bit on the flimsy side if I’m honest.
Also saw the FELDER range at their factory and Milton Keynes and their stuff feels a bit more sturdy but you pay the price for it. But... with FELDER (if you can afford it) you get a saw, spindle, slider and dado capability. Only thing it doesn’t have is another mitre groove to the right of the saw.
Yours looks like a great option although I’m not sure the grid where I am would handle me stepping up to 3 phase.

 

[sploo]

Depending on your power needs, you should be able to run some 3 phase machinery with a VFD. I've got a couple of these (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NEW-2-2KW-22 ... 2749.l2649); one for a 3hp 12" planer/thicknesser, and another for a 3hp Startrite 275 table saw. They run fine from standard 13 amp plugs*.

It opens up a few possibilities anyway, as 3 phase machinery seems to put off a lot domestic buyers because they believe they can't run them.

* As long as the motor supports [from memory] delta wiring configuration (i.e. ~240v input). Some motors will only take 415v, and the cheap VFDs won't step up from 240v to 415v.