JOE_M

The top of mine is nice and smooth, but there's a pile of sawdust building up in that one spot underneath. Maybe it's time for a brazilian wax?

Great job, not the numbers you wanted but still pretty good.

Thanks. They don't have the puzzle blades I like, but they have a lot of other cool stuff to look at/buy.

He's budgeted $500, which may be why he's narrowed it down to the Dewalt or the Delta. I've got the Dewalt. I like it a bajillion times more than the entry level saws I had before it. It was a bit agressive at first but I adjusted it so the blade is more square (back/front) to the table and now use it to make jigsaw puzzles in 1/4". I do think it's louder than when I got it and that bothers me because I've had it a few years but haven't really put a lot of hours into it. At that price point I think it's still a good saw.

I had some in front of my mill for a while. They're nice for standing but I wouldn't want to have to push something heavy on wheels across it. I threw them out when they got slippery from oil and had lots of little metal shavings embedded in them - something you probably wouldn't have to worry about in a woodworking shop. If you've got a store like CAL Ranch or Tractor Supply you should stop in and look at horse mats. They're 20x denser for the same thickness and will hold up to anything.

Congrats! You're making the big time now. Just don't let it go to your head - remember your roots and don't forget that the paparazzi is everywhere. The last thing you want is for Mrs. Iggy to be watching TMZ and see a video of you and a bunch of young nubile scrollsaw groupies snorting lines of sawdust at the VIP table in the back of Woodcraft.

irfanview is a free photo editor and it's got a lot of good stuff. Conversion is as simple as opening a pdf in irfanview, and saving as a jpg. If you're wanting to do patterns later on, irfanview is good for taking a picture and easily converting to b/w or eliminating the background one shade at a time to make it simpler to manipulate in inkscape or gimp.

Not really my thing but I was babysitting a cnc router a few weeks ago so I cut out about 20 of these on the scroll saw to kill time, using common pine I had laying around. Here's half, the rest are drying in the workshop. The book advertised "complete instructions" and the instructions for the colors were "this is a trade secret." That was probably the best written part of the book, which is now in the garbage. I can't really tell what level they're geared for - there is no continuity between animals - but they're going to a 4-1/2 year old. Colors are diluted acrylics, wood dyes, wood stains, and whatever else I had in the shop. Finish is just a couple shots of lacquer. I tried the cut shellac people suggested, it just ran right off. I tried dipping shellac straight out of the can, it stuck but was very rough and impossible to sand the edges smooth. I tried dipping in tung oil and the tung oil turned grayish purple green and ran off, except for the nooks and crannies where it stuck in big blobs that made it impossible to fit the pieces together until I scraped them off. On the bright side, I got rid of a few cans of finish that were just going stale on the shelf.

Rant on. At this point I wouldn't mind seeing a single bleeping chart listing all the old saws, all the new saws, with columns noting if it's top/bottom/both feeding, table size, what tilts where etc. Individual reviews are nice but they're a pain in the badonkadonk (No, Windows 10, don't auto-correct that to belladonna - I know what I said) when trying to comparison shop. Same goes for the names. Old Excalibur, new Excalibur, Seyco, King, Lego whatever - this saw is supposedly the same saw as that one, which is the same design as that 3rd one but with a different color and the name is changed to protect the innocent, except when it's sold in Canada by Busy Bee but not by Princess Auto because, well you know why. Just give me one simple chart and be done with it. Rant off.

Good luck, hope it's a permanent fix this time.

no. i make it, give it away, move on to the next project. I don't do much repeating. I take the occasional picture, but usually don't remember to do that until it's too late.

Wish it was October, that's the month I'm stuck visiting family in MI every year and there's never anything going on in October.

I guess it's a glass half full, glass half empty kind of thing. I see it as spent $1700, got two bum saws and now waiting on a lower arm that he has to install himself. Blame it on shipping, blame it on whatever - doesn't matter to me. I don't care if it comes on a slow-boat from China, or personally delivered by the owner of the little made-in-USA ma & pa operation - if I spent $1700 on a saw, I don't expect to get two lemons. A little more effort put into the building and shipping would be a lot less time that Nilus has to spend on the phone dealing with unhappy customers. I'm sure there are those who disagree and think that this company is still God's Gift to Scrollsawing because they're such a small operation doing this for the love of it or whatever, and hey - that's great, to each his own. I do hope Iggy ends up - soon - with a saw that works the way he wants/deserves.

No, they're made by the same manufacturer (factory). It's a different company (front end) telling them what to build and what is acceptable. I had a 1988 Mustang. Made by the same company that put out the '71 Boss 351. 1971 Ford would have been ashamed to put their name on 1988's mustang.

Cherry is nice - smells like Swisher Sweets without the cancer. Most of the rosewoods smell like a well-perfumed old lady. Walnut has a nice smell but it's no cherry. On the other side, I've cut some nasty smelling exotics. One light-colored wood, maybe guatambu, not yellowheart or satinwood, made the shop smell like cat urine until I'd vacuumed up all the sawdust. And I got some dark wood from woodworker's source (fake walnut?) that came from latin/south America and it smelled like gasoline when I cut it.

If you find that too much, my Dewalt came very agressive but I did some tweaking to calm it down. You can look at your bottom clamp and see if something like this is possible.

https://www.sipuk.co.uk/scroll-saw.html He's on the other side of the pond.

When I ran my own web store I used Zen Cart - a free open source eCommerce software suite. There's also Magento and a half dozen more. They're all customizable - pick your layout, design pages, background images, product presentation, keywords, payment processors etc. They all also include shipping modules from all the major carriers like UPS, USPS and FEDEX. I could choose flat-rate shipping, or weight-based shipping. If I chose weight-based then I had a place to input the weight of each item, and a setting for tare weight (for the box and styrofoam padding), my ship-from zipcode and a box for the customer to put in their zip-code to calculate postage. For each item I could choose if I would ship it priority, express, 1st class, book-rate etc. I could put multiple options and let the customer decide how fast they wanted it. I could also link that to Paypal or Stamps.com and print out postage through them. I was linking directly to the USPS website until they stopped giving online discounts. It meant weighing each item before listing, but it gave accurate results for the USPS. The UPS I never trusted because they kept playing games with gas surcharges or their definition of oversized. And if you go with USPS you can buy the postage online and the carrier can pick up the package at your house (Provided you're in the city where they deliver to your location. If you're rural and far enough from your mailbox that they make you pick up packages at the post office, they won't come out to your house to pick up.)

I remember making one of those many years ago but with a couple of holes to hold ketchup and mustard bottles.

Thanks, The projects already cut out in pine so I guess food coloring is out as an option.

Please explain the food coloring finish. I've got a project that needs coloring and what I've been doing is just a big pain in the butt.

Here's an idea, you'd have to play with the font (or make the letters raised). The quote is pretty common.

I'm not a machinist but I've got all the tools (until Tuesday when someone comes for the lathe and surface grinder) and tapped quite a few holes (I also use a #7 for 1/4-20). If we go by real tolerances, an M6 major diameter is 5.974 max, 5.794 min. If I haven't messed up the math, that equates to .235" and a .188" hole, making a .203 even looser - and that's if you get the fattest M6 bolt sitting in the hardware drawer. That would make me agree with Mark1 that maybe this isn't the way you want to go. Perhaps you could verify that they're making a 13/64 hole, and not a #7 hole, and once you know for sure just try it yourself on a scrap piece of metal. You can buy either one of those drill bits for less than $4 at your local hardware store. Drill the hole, tap it with your M6x1 tap, and see if you're happy with the fit.

Does the software for your printer let you adjust size?

say what?