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Comment by rainforest | Hacker News Reader

Forgive my lack of knowledge, but what's the difference between a European sliding saw and a table saw with a sled?

In the video[1], you can see the operator walking with the sled to rip a large panel. A cross cut sled on a traditional Powermatic/Delta/SawStop doesn't have the same capacity and the operator ends up standing in front of the saw and bending his hip to push the sled into the blade. The geometry of motion is different. With a sliding saw, you're mostly out of the line of fire of kickbacks.

(The saw in the video is $40k but you can get used sliding saws for $5k which is about the price of a brand new SawStop Industrial saw.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVYUss6pJqQ&feature=youtu.be...

Seems good for a commercial application or a large volume hobbyist. Actually, not too different from what they seem to use at the hardware store for their cuts.

But, what about the small scale home hobbyist that can't dedicate a huge space to their table saw (and has a budget under $1k).

>Actually, not too different from what they seem to use at the hardware store for their cuts.

At the hardware stores I visit like Lowes & Home Depot, I see vertical panel saws which is a different beast: https://www.google.com/search?q=powermatic+panel+saw&source=...

The blade moves on tracks and the wood is stationary for cross cuts. Euro-style sliding table saw is the opposite of that.

For rip cuts, yes, the operator locks down the saw position and then pushes the wood through the blade. The issue with the vertical panel saw is that the top half of the rip cut wants to close the gap and bind the blade because of gravity. The horizontal surface of the the Euro slider doesn't have that issue.

>But, what about the small scale home hobbyist that can't dedicate a huge space to their table saw (and has a budget under $1k).

I would say make a stretch and pay $299 more to get the cheapest SawStop which is the $1299 portable jobsite saw: https://www.google.com/shopping/product/11697127655919696780

A tracksaw (Festool is a good brand) is a better alternative than most table saws, at least for cutting down sheet goods. Combine it with a chop saw and you've covered a lot of the use cases for a table saw.

So, it's a circular saw that can optionally ride on a long and straight metal track that clamps to your wood. I have rigged up things like that with 2x4s in the past.

Hadn't seen it as an actual product before, but much more convenient this way, which makes it more likely to get used. Not as advantageous as a table saw if you need to do a lot of identical cuts; but, seems like it would work well for the occasional need.

I might just replace my cheap/scary table saw with one of these the next time I build something. Thanks.

>Not as advantageous as a table saw if you need to do a lot of identical cuts;

You can do repeated identical cuts if you buy extra accessories for the tracksaw.[1] (I assume we're talking about "repeated cuts" using stops instead of constantly re-measuring with a ruler.) The parallel guides work ok but it's a lot more work to set up and dynamically adjust widths than a table saw's sliding fence.

If you like to use table saws to cut dados, rabbets, and slots for box/drawer joints, a tracksaw isn't as useful for that. Might have to get a router for those cuts in addition to the miter saw when supplementing a tracksaw.

[1] example: http://www.festoolproducts.com/festool-57000023-parallel-gui...

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