It is very forgiving and it will not hurt blades or fingers. The only thing on earth slicker than high density polyethelene is teflon. At my place of employment we use HDPE for saw fences. Or buy a long piece of thick phenolic and scrape the existing extrusion to mount it flat, square and straight. But will most likely either endure and work around it for a few years. I'd like to have machine tools large enough to make a replacement out of ductile iron. These issues are enough to make it a nuisance for some tasks like sawing dovetail drawer box features to accomodate hardware (Blum undermount) drawer slides or even dadoes on tall boards. It also has a very slight gradual curve lengthwise. It leans a bit, and it is fatter in the middle than at the bottom or top. OTOH, used in the tall fence configuration, the extrusion is distorted. And it can be slid out, turned flat, and used that way as a very low height fence so that fence height deviation has no influence on the work. It has some interesting features in that it can be slid forward or back long ways on the saw. The fence that is giving me problems is the one on the saw closest to the camera. A temporary spoil board can be made very true and screwed on for the rare occasions it would be useful to saw into the fence. So having a very true and repeatable fence is worthwhile. This saw is only used for small detail work, dadoes, and similar within the range of the 10' and under blades that can be fitted. My punisaw (not shown) has a powermatic cast iron fence adapted to it, which i surface ground flat, square, and straight. One of my saws has a tall hard maple fence, waxed, it is probably 10 years old by now, and still an excellent fence for most all purposes. Barring that, it probably should not be concave toward the blade but your preference may vary. In between the extremes is lots of room for creative adaptation. If the saw is only used to rip material that will be finished by other means (shape, mould, or plane to width) then probably the only critical factors are that it be sort of straight, parallel to the blade, and 'slippery'. Or cutting say, glued up panel sections with different thickness lippings on the finished reference edge. This can be critical when cutting, e.g., dadoes that need to be closely aligned, in different thickness work pieces. Else different thickness work will register on different parts of the fence and come out slightly different widths at the same setting. I like a high fence, So it is more critical than a low fence that it be dead square vertically to the table. It does depend to some extent on how you use the saw. This is timely for me, as I have a fence that needs some attention. The Vega fence had a couple of neat features that the more commonly found For mine, I installed a scoop hood below the saw and a 90-degree aluminum. Download: Vega table saw fence installation instructions Yeah I guess the DIY section makes the most sense for a table saw topic.
Please remember that safety standards have changed over the years and information in old manuals as well as the old machines themselves may. As can be seen in the final photos, I have installed a Vega fence that I have had machined with an offset for the sliding table. Manufactured/Badged by: Oliver Machinery Co. Hi Thom, You will definitely like the vega fence.
Posted by THOM RIDER on Jat 10:11pm in Beginners' Zone View Discussions I just picked up a vega pro 40 off of Craigslist recently.