2y ago

Is this an acceptable amount of flatness for a new table saw? Sawstop CTS

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Sawstop CTS Flatness? - Album on Imgur

Doesn't seem flat enough to me. I've always heard the tablesaw is the flattest surface in your shop. Is this okay?

14 comments

I hate to say it, but it's probably an acceptable amount of flatness for a jobsite saw. I'm willing to bet their cast iron offerings have better tolerances. You do have the safety features, though.
Bro, you are busting out the straight edge and feeler gauges looking for sub mm precision on a portable saw?
If you are working with wood don't bother worrying that much. It's incredibly forgiving and having a little bit of slop frequently makes assembly and finishing easier.
If you need to cut things to the fraction of a mm or sub degree accuracy you should be using a mill.
- Depends on what you wanna do, hobby some 3x4s together or building a hardwood dresser. From experience, the quarter mm you are over on one end is a not fitting drawer on the other. Wood is forgiving, alright, but the real fun begins when it's made precisely.
  
  Very true. That being said my old man is a phenomenal carpenter/general contractor and as far as I'm aware all the cabinets and such he's ever built were assembled on the concrete floor of his garage. No where near as flat as that table saw top.
  One of the things he tries to teach me was that keeping in mind and working with the limitations of your tools and materials is what makes the final piece come together as planned. The things I've seen him do with a jank jigsaw older than I am were impressive to say the least.
When I purchased my first woodworking equipment, I was thinking much more like an engineer than a craftsman. I pretty quickly found that wood is a fairly forgiving material, and being off by a few thousandths on a table saw isn’t usually a big deal. But, it depends on what you’re building and what other tools you have.
I have already contacted SawStop. Waiting to hear back.
- The diagonal table flatness spec for the Sawstop Jobsite Pro is 0.033 inches. (The CTS doesn't have a specified flatness on the Sawstop site.) The gauges in your pictures are 0.015.
  So yes, that is normal. Yours is twice as flat as the specified tolerance for a model that is twice the price.
  
  Thanks very much for that info.
- There are feeler gauges in loads of these pictures.
- I included some pictures of the fence against my straight edge showing them both being dead flat for reference. Many of the pictures show feeler guages with the thickness.
  
  My mistake, I entirely missed the link.

14 comments