Zero clearance table saw insert

When ripping thin slices of wood, it's a lot safer to have a zero-clearance insert in the table saw as it prevents the thin slices from getting sucked down inside the saw an possibly jamming the blade.

Whilst out running around Christmas time, I spotted a piece of UPVC cladding that had obviously blown of the back of a truck and was littering the countryside. I thought at the time that it might be useful for making a table saw insert and made a mental note to go back for it which I did a few days later. Clean up the countryside and do a bit of recycling, how's that for a bit of good citizenship?

It had suffered a bit of damage as it had bounced off the road, and it was pretty filthy, but it still had the protective plastic on it in places, and it was a fair sized chunk.

UPVC cladding

Here is the insert I made (white) by tracing around the original one (yellow). You can see the difference in the width of the slot that the saw blade comes through.

UPVC zero-clearance insert

Comments

Vox Pathfinder 15 Tremolo Repair

Last year, I snapped up a Vox Pathfinder 15 (non-reverb) combo amplifier from ebay. The seller was a charity shop, and the amplifier was listed as "untested", so I was taking a bit of a gamble, but figured I'd have a good chance of being able to fix it it it wasn't working, and cosmetically, it looked almost mint. When it arrived, I plugged it in, and as you guessed, it was not working. Barely any sound, and what sound there was was horribly distorted. One thin I did notice was the the power on LED was not aligned correctly with the hole in the back panel, so I did quickly took it apart, and realigned the potentiometers and LED indicator, but didn't have a look in detail at the circuit. I put it back together, but the problem remained. My guess was that the problem was the famous "cambridgitis" (just google that term and you'll find all about it). Basically, a problem where the optocoupler that controls the tremolo circuit fails. A common failure...

Vox Pathfinder 10 and Pathfinder 15 Simulation

I've got a Vox Pathfinder 10 amplifier that I bought a couple of years ago, and I love it. It's a great little amplifier, but I don't care for the distortion channel, it just sounds harsh to my ears. There are quite simple modifications that can be done to this amplifier to remove the clipping LED's and increase the boost of the clean channel (check out Ben Craven's mods for details). I'd been considering doing some of these, but whilst researching the subject, I discovered that the currently out of production (as at Nov '18) Pathfinder 15/15R generally receives a lot more love than the Pathfinder 10. I found schematics for both the PF15 and the PF15R online, and saw that there were a lot of similarities between the PF10 and the PF15, particularly the earlier non-reverb PF15. The PF15R (with reverb) is quite a bit different after the first two opamp stages. I thought I'd model both the PF10 and PF15 pre-amp stages in LTspice to see how they compar...

Things went all fuzzy

Buoyed by the success of last month's " Chafer Drive ", I've been busy drawing up layouts for a few more small effects that I want to build, and first up is a tribute to the " Shin Ei Companion Fuzz FY-2 ". This was a Japanese fuzz pedal made in the 1970's and is generally well-regarded in the DIY effects community for it's classic fuzz tones. The original came in a large wedge shaped box, but my plan was to squeeze it into a Hammond 1590A just as I did with the " Chafer Drive ". This was undoubtedly going to be more challenging, since (a) the circuit is larger, and (b) it has two control knobs as opposed to one. I had some standard 25 x 9 stripboard which I thought would be ideal for this purpose, so I challenged myself to layout the circuit with that in mind. The original circuit use some obscure 2SC536 transistors (Hfe 160-560) that were no longer manufactured, but I had a whole bunch of 2SC1685 (Hfe 160-460) transistors that I...

Things With Strings

Search This Blog