De Walt RAS 1251 – Service
I bought the saw at a Pick-n-Pay Hypermarket in 1996 on a ‘special’. Paid ZAR3,966.98
(I kept all the documents for insurance purposes)
The local De Walt agents offered a 2 day hands on course on using the saw and also maintenance.
The maintenance consisted of taking their saw to pieces and re-assembly. I made copious notes which I later typed up and kept in plastic sleeves. The MS-MD Book.
There is an annual service (in my case about every 5 years) except for the table alignment which needs to be checked attended to regularly.
The table is very sensitive to bumps and can push the levels out.
The last major service was in about 2005 (red face)
In one of the wooden chests in the garage is a tray with the spanners, allen keys and service manual as well as all the other spare parts for the saw.
The extension arms, nuts & bolts, bottom blade guard and adjustable fingers for ripping.
When we moved, the saw was located in its slot in the new garage and nothing else done. So, a year later when I got fed up with sawing by hand, the big maintenance day arrived.
The top was still all loose and stacked against a wall out of the way.
Get the tools and the MS-MD book. (Monkey See Monkey Do) and start stripping.
Lay down some old rags on the big table and keep all the parts together, the biggest and heaviest being the motor and carriage. (Remember to first remove the blade!!!!!)
Then off comes the arm. You are left with the top frame and the back shaft.
The back shaft is cleaned with mentholated spirits (the purple kind that the hobos drink!) and then lightly greased with Vaseline. I made a cloth cover which fits around the shaft keeping it clean from the saw dust.
The tension on the shaft is adjusted by some locking nuts at the back. It needs to wind up and down effortlessly.
Next the armThe rail-slots are also cleaned with the meths and the rest vacuumed and wiped with a damp cloth.
The lock lever and mitre latch are also taken apart and cleaned.
The arm can go back onto the shaft and wait for the carriage to be cleaned.
The tricky one – the top of the carriage, yoke, with the bearings.
You have to follow the instructions very carefully on removing the lock arm so that you do not destroy the star washer. Once that’s off, then 2 nuts to loosen and the top is split.
This gets vacuumed. The bearings are also cleaned using the meths. (you can get high on the smell!)
At the same time vacuum all around the motor. I also used a paint brush to loosen any stubborn dust.
To reassemble the procedure is reversed and remember the star washer can only go on one way.
The carriage can now be rolled into the grooves on the arm. The carriage weighs a few Kg’s and needs to be handled carefully.
The final adjustment on the carriage is on the third eccentric bearing which can be adjusted from the outside.
It sits behind the rip scale pointer
The yolk should move freely back and forth.
The yolk with the swivel latch above the motor.
By now its beer time, so tidy up and leave it till the morning.
Setting the table.This is best left until you are calm with lots of patience.
Step 1 is to flip the motor over by 45 degrees, then adjust the height so that the shaft just touches the top of the extended frame. The arm is then swung from side to side across the frame and the frame adjusted where necessary.
When you are satisfied, the table can now be bolted on. The above procedure is then again performed across the table top, adjusting the screw in the middle.
The blade is examined for wear and tear, and looked ok except for being dirty and gunged from sawing pine.
Into a bucket with some warm water and Super 10, an old nail brush, and some elbow grease.
Came out looking very good indeed.
The blade is fitted back onto the motor. The cover is left off as one now needs to set the blade vertical to the table using metal engineer squares.
Now the tricky part of setting the blade 90 degrees to the fence.
A nice big engineers square and the blade next to it.
The mitre latch is adjusted either left or right until the blade runs all the way next to the square.
When adjusting, cover the blade with a cloth in case your hand slips. (my right arm has 6 very nice scars from the blade)
The final task is fitting the arm cover and adjusting the pointer on the mitre scale to the 0 degrees position.
The POP
(proof of the pudding) is cutting some stock and checking against the squares. This will be done when the dust extraction is fitted.
I made a ‘hood’ from 3mm MDF which rests on a shelf fitted to the back frame.
In the shelf, in line with the blade, is a 100mm plumbing fitting which tapers down to 50mm and is attached to some 50mm irrigation pipe running down and under the frame.
The big gap is due to not having the fence in place.
The big vac pipe then fits into this pipe. It catches probably about 75% of the dust. I still need to fit the rubber connections to the pipe.
(The rope holding the pipe is temporary as I first want to see how well it sucks from this new position. In the old workshop the pipe ran 3m to the vac)
The saw drops a lot of dust through the table holes onto the shelf at the bottom. What I might do is fit a catching tray under the top frame and link it to the 50mm pipe.
The final work on this saw is the levelling of the work bench top to the same level as the saw top.
Thank you for reading.
Cheers
Phil