hotshot

Marquetry on the Scroll saw? Or did you use the knives/razers?

Try This: Link to PDF Tutorial In Inlay The site trying to be too smart and Preview the contents of any link, which may confuse some browsers, so using the forum link tool to include the link explicitly seems to work more like what I intended.

Here is an inlay tutorial that might help as well. You might have to click image below, then click again to bring up the pdf so that you can scroll through it.

I think critical critiques of the saws may be a no win. I personally love critical assessments, but candid conversations are hard to have in the forums without a lot of emotion. I love all my saws for different reasons, but if someone came on the forum and said: 788s/Deltas are nice but for some work are over aggressive and seem to wear out with less hours than the higher end saws. The EX/Clones are great, but the dust collection system sucks, the clamps easily strip, and the stability of the patents holders and the manufacturing companies making them are questionable Jet seems promising, but the top clamps may need tweaking if you change blade sizes radically, or if you want to top feed, you can forget it. Hegners are Awesome, unless you prefer top feeding, a big table, aggressive cutting, affordability. You can use as a clamp firing rifle. Hawks are exceptional, except the Owners don't run their company like a business, the adjustments are tricky, and the clamps swing, and the aggression settings change the angle of the blade making the higher aggressive settings useless for puzzle type applications Ryobi, Harbor Freight, Wen (and all the saws that look like them have bottom clamps that are incredibly inaccessible) and are tools evidently designed for torture. Proxxon sure is pretty, but the 115 model specifically is more useless than stuff used to add nutrients to my garden. CW40, Rexon, PCB 370, Craftsman, Tradesmen, and all the saws that look like the CW40 are great beginner saws, except they wear like a 788, are bottom feed only, and the dust collection panel has to be removed in order to easily access the bottom clamp, and has a table almost as small as the Hegner. Eclipse may be the best saw ever, except changing blades seems a little clumsy, it was very very expensive, and it seems to have died with Ernie. ......if someone were to actually say that . . . wholly Molly would that be bad. :-) I actually love and appreciate most of those saws, (except Proxxon and Ryobi/clones, which I got rid of, and hate without out bounds). -----Randy

A few tips that might help: Practice with scrap of the same thickness, and cut circles, tweaking the angle, until you get it set perfect. Biggest secret for getting these perfect is to make sure you cut without any "side pressure." Take it very very slow on the corners (the blade needs to be caught up with zero bow). Hide your entry hole in the deep area behind the wing, between the wing and the tail. With a little practice. you can put the hole right at the edge of your line, in the waste area, and drill through so that it just barely hits the the waste area on the bottom piece, but the angle has to be exact. If you can do that, there will be no visible entry hole at all. It a neat trick if you can pull it off. -----Randy

Kev, it occurred to me that, it could be that if you move you spent blade from the Hawk to the 788, the aggressive action might make it feel like it has more life. That is to say, maybe that Hawk doesn’t dull the blade faster, but maybe it needs sharper blades because of the less aggressive cutting. That is one test that would be easy to do.

I loved the speed test. Would love to see you do a variation where you test longevity.

These are the "PS Wood Super Sharps". I don't know a lot about them except they are super expensive (about $1/blade at Woodcraft). Another member on this forum did some informal testing and found these the fastest cutting for the scenario he did. I've had projects where I was having a hard time getting through a piece, and really having to push hard to get it to cut at all. I would have probably given a few dollars to ease that pain. If these are indeed more aggressive/sharper, I suspect they would have been marginally faster, but still painful. Just for the fun of it, I might pick me up a package next time I'm in woodcraft just to have around the next time I struggle with a piece.

It makes sense to me that the Dewalt would cut faster because the blade moves forward significantly on the down stroke (abeit staying perpendicular to the table). So slamming the blade into the wood seems like it would create a more aggressive cut. But tests are always fun. There is a video on the Pegas site where they do a hands off test comparing their blades to the Mach blades. Their setup is not complex, but I think it uses a weight to pull the board forward. http://www.scies.ch/products-in-use.html. It looks like a simple sled, with a pulley and weight hanging off the back would work. Of course, the Hawk would need to have the blade perpendicular to be valid. I think what would be very interesting is how each saw would do on thinner wood.

Kevin, I think it might be an impatience thing for you and me, but for Iggy, I think it is about the numbers. Like you, I'm not a production cutter, and may get impatient trying to make it through thick hard wood, but I'm not moving a lot of product, so losing sales doesn't play into this for me at least. Iggy is able to sell a lot of product, so it makes sense that creating these as fast and cheap as he can makes sense. So, for Iggy, time is money, and he has to find the balance that works best for him. On the note of cost effectiveness, in production mode, I wonder if the blades last longer in the Hawk, because the longer stroke uses more of the blade. Compared to the cost/profit of the puzzles, the cost of blades may be nominal, I don't know. So going a little further down that road, would the time saved by using expensive "Super Sharps" actually be more cost effective because it get's more puzzles out the door? Staying with that line of thinking, maybe the best combination is a DW/EX paired with the "Super Sharps." Or maybe an EX tuned for more aggression than the 788, with Supersharps. Iggy, if you lived close, I would kick the agression up on the EX, buy you some super sharps for fun, and let you test drive it. Why I love this conversation, and believe it is important: We usually judge saws based on things like durability, depth of cut, ease of blade changes, and blade travel is usually seen as a bad thing. It is kind of nice to turn this on it's head, and in light of different circumstances and needs, and look at the saws in terms of productivity for this specific project type and see how that affects overall costs. The game would change considerably if the project type was fretwork, thick puzzle boxes, or traditional puzzles cut on thin baltic birch. Despite the tension in the conversation, I think the over all conversation is awesome! --------Randy

Here is how to do it in case you have never seen this done: 1. Make the arm level with the table using the back knob (then never touch that back knob again (Smile) ). Just measure the arm distance to the table on both ends, or put a reference block under the arm, and move it along the saw under the arm until the gap remains the same. 2. Loosen the screws around the motor with your Hex wrench 3. Turn the speed all the way to slowest setting, then turn the saw on, and then rotate the motor, finding the sweet spot with the least movement 4. Tighten the motor back up and you are done. You should not have to do this a lot. Just remember, don't mess with that back knob. ps: It occurred to me that you might not like the minimal blade travel setting. You can make the travel very very aggressive if you like that, or can make it minimal. It's kind of cool that you can go back and forth between the two. If you choose the more aggressive setting, make sure you have the blade moving forward on the down stroke.

My 788 is pretty smooth, not not as smooth as the Ex by any stretch. The Ex can be tuned for minimal blade travel, and that can affect smoothness of that saw. Have you done that yet? ------Randy

Gotta wonder if there isn't some Warrantee angle that could be played to get more miles out of the 788s. On Amazon, it lists the warrantee for 3 years. If you could burn through one per year, then send it in for warrantee repair, seems like you could get like 3 Dewalts for the price of one. For this strategy, you would have to rely on a backup for some long stretches as I don't think these replacements would come quickly.

I think the consensus are that the EX style outlast the 788s. Years ago it was commonly said that they had better components, but that may or may not have been true. So, you might be right, it would be very interesting to test that theory. I think the 16" Kings go for about $600 (I'm assuming without stand).

For what you do, I'm really surprised you didn't go the EX or Seyco route. If I were in your shoes as a production cutter, and needed the aggression, I would be on the EX/Seyco in a heartbeat as the mechanics are very similar to the 788, except that you can adjust aggression to more or less than what you have on the 788 (while keeping the blade perpendicular), there is already a mechanism to hold the arm up, and they seem to last longer than the 788s. For you puzzles, it looks like the EX 16" would work. For highly intricate stuff, even the minimal blade travel I get on the EX (tuned for minimal aggression) is sometimes more than I like. The Hawk has other challenges for me, but I've set it up as my primary for coin cutting for now to see if I can make it work. But, after my testing, I suspect the EX will remain my coin cutting saw because of how it performs with very small delicate blades, but we shall see. I don't think there is "One" saw that is better than every other saw at everything. I think you have to match the saw to your own needs which are affected by your specific project types, your cutting style, and other requirements specific to your needs. -----Randy

The series is holding up to time. Very very well done series. Hope Netflix resurrects it.

So, I asked Pegas about pricing and such, and they had one of their vendors in the U.S. contact me. I've never heard of these guys, but here is a link to these clamps on their site: https://qtena.com/pegas-scroll-saw-blade-chuck-head-set-p-9607.html After shipping, the price was over $90, which is way way too much for this I think. I'm all for a fair profit, but come on Pegas! Hopefully they will come down a bit on those prices. In any case, I did order this to try/review. ------Randy

It doesn't have the Zig Zag spring, so it is newer than mine. It has the front quick tensioner which is a major positive. It already has the QuickClamp, though they are not expensive, it is still nice.. The last Item I would look for is the speed control. If it is a VS, then it might be a good deal, depending on price.

TGP, let me tell you the secret to creating content with software like Gimp and other tools. When you watch the videos, you have to change the way you are looking at the software. If you are trying to memorize the steps, your road will be very very long and limited. You have to watch with the intent of understanding "how it works". For example, if you watched someone drive a car, and watched the steering wheel, and took notes, it would look like "turn a little left, a little right, a little more right, a little left, a sharp right, and etc." But you see, the driver understands how the car reacts to the motion of the wheel, so he adjusts as he goes. He doesn't memorize steps. In terms of Gimp, you need to understand what each of the tools do for you. The crop tool, the paintbrush vs pencil, eraser, filters, and etc. Once you understand how to use the tool, you can navigate from point A to point B without following a set of steps.

Even on the smallest of the Jewelers blades, I just push the blade to the back of the clamp. I think you are doing something wrong. Try lowering the arm a little, checking to see if the set screw is just barely "proud". When you get a feel for it, you can feel if the blade is all the way back, or if you have pushed the blade against the set screw or the clamp screw. The process of placing the blade feels that same as it does for my 788.

I love the original clamps, but there are some issues with wear on that upper lever. Seyco themselves offered a "modification" to help with that issue. For several years, Pegas has been selling their own branded version of the EX clone under their own name, so, I'm sure they were getting support calls on some of these issues, and decided to sell a modification to help resolve it. I sent Seyco a message to see if they are going to be selling this mod. p.s. I did hear back from Seyco and they haven't gotten their hands on one of these for evaluation yet.

Replaced my lower clamp once. But from time to time, that upper tension lever flies up, so I know I'm getting close to having to replace that. But, beyond that, I like new toys, and there are not a lot of third part options for upgrading the EX, so this is pretty unusual. -----Randy

So, got a little shock when I opened up the latest SSW&C. Evidently, Pegas just released what they call an "Overhaul" to the Excalibur (and Clones) scroll saws. I wouldn't call it an overhaul, but it is a complete replacement for the top and bottom clamp mechanism. For those that are very experience with the EX, you know there is some room for improvement here. Seyco has a milder enhancement also. The new Pegas Clamp replacement is supposed to be 40% lighter for less vibration, easier to use, and etc. Here is a peek: Here is a better peek from a Vendor here: https://www.dictum.com/en/tools/woodworking-metalworking/saws/mitre-saws-saw-guides/704769/pegas-saw-blade-holder-complete-set So, to be clear, this would work for EX, clones (Axminster, Carbatec, Pegas, King, and Excelsior) and Seyco. Anyway, I'm excited. The product doesn't show up on the Pegas web site yet, but at least this one vendor has it, and the SSWC ad says it is coming in "January 2018"

So, I come and just want to see all the latest "activity", regardless of where it is in the forum. I just want it all in one place, so I simply have a shortcut to go here: http://www.scrollsawvillage.com/discover/ This is the same as going to "Activity", then clicking "All Activity."

Elizabeth Olsen delivered a few new patterns. The Cats I'm pretty happy with. I upload the pattern for that as soon as I get the illustrator files for it to convert to pdf. The Airforce design needs a little work. The text was initially too small to cut, so I tried to enlarge that part, but I still had issues cutting it. I was off on the entry holes, throwing some of the letters off. For this kind of pattern, especially at this scale, I would rather have the inverse for the letters, so I'll see if she can come up with the design in the inverse. Her original design would work well if it was expanded and cut in wood at a much larger scale. I've converted the source vector file to PDF, so in that format, you can be scaled to any size, without losing detail. Here is the Original AirForce Pattern, you may have to enlarge a few of the bridges: AirForce_ElizabethOlsen.pdf AirForce_ElizabethOlsen.pdf