Rating 3.5 out of 5
I've been doing a fair amount of resawing lately and built my own resaw fence that works fairly well but in my quest to get even better resawing, I decided to buy this attachment to the magswitch base plate. I really like their feather board and use it all the time on my table saw. Well thought out and super easy to use. Fast setup. I use it all time, more than any other safety device for my table saw. I give it a 5 out of 5 rating so I was pretty much sold on the resaw fence and was thinking that I could switch between the feather board and resaw attachment with ease. The way it's designed, you can adjust for blade drift on the fly. At $26, sounded like a good deal.
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The first disappointment was that there is so much assembly and adjustment that it's not practical to switch the fence with the feather board. I'll need to dedicate the base plate to the resaw fence and buy another for the feather board. Sigh. So much for a good deal. That $26 deal became a $46 cost. I guess I should have thought that one through. For what it's worth, they never SAID you could easily switch between the two. But, I hate being "incremented". I'll take a half point off for that.
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Ok, so onward to assembly. Relatively straightforward though their instructions are pretty poor. No exploded view and not really very clear wording. Parts pictures did not exactly match what was in the package, either. Another half point off.
Got it assembled and mounted it on my bandsaw only to discover that the magswitches that are supposed to hold the base to the steel/iron table are a little too long and the whole assembly moves around when "locked" down. Ugh. I never noticed this before with the feather board in place because it wasn't critical for that application. But in a resaw fence, it absolutely is. I used 6 layers of blue tape to shim it up enough so the magnets pull the base plate tight against the table. Pretty disappointing that it doesn't just work. A full point off.
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I will give them credit for having a halfway decent mechanism for adjusting the fence parallel to the blade. Especially since having to shim it, I made it a little off vertical. So, I got it ready to test out.
My first try didn't go so well but that's my fault for letting the bottom of the board drift a bit. So I clamped a piece of wood to the table to prevent that and resawed a 6" piece of alder. Nice clean job. Being able to change the angle of the board to account for blade drift allowed me to keep it within a 1/16" of my line. Not bad at all.
Then I resawed a piece of 7/8" bubinga. I have been dreading this as it's got some really nice grain and I didn't want to mess it up. I wanted to have 2 3/8" pieces for a box I'm making my wife for Valentines day so the stakes were kind of high. On one edge, I scribed two lines 13/32" from each side of the board. This gave me a 1/16" "channel" for the cut and 1/32" on each side to plane off. Not much margin for error here. With the new fence, I was able to stay between the lines and the cut was so clean, I am tempted to just scrape it down and call it good.
So, once it is set up, it is a really nice resaw fence. Since it works so well, I gave 1/2 point back. But, I really do hate it when a company has a great concept but misses out on some rather obvious issues. MagSwitch should look at Incra to see how it's done.
Even with all my complaints, I recommend this product for resawing. Once you get it working, it really does a good job.
MagSwitch Resaw Attachment 3.5/5.
I've been doing a fair amount of resawing lately and built my own resaw fence that works fairly well but in my quest to get even better resawing, I decided to buy this attachment to the magswitch base plate. I really like their feather board and use it all the time on my table saw. Well thought out and super easy to use. Fast setup. I use it all time, more than any other safety device for my table saw. I give it a 5 out of 5 rating so I was pretty much sold on the resaw fence and was thinking that I could switch between the feather board and resaw attachment with ease. The way it's designed, you can adjust for blade drift on the fly. At $26, sounded like a good deal.
The first disappointment was that there is so much assembly and adjustment that it's not practical to switch the fence with the feather board. I'll need to dedicate the base plate to the resaw fence and buy another for the feather board. Sigh. So much for a good deal. That $26 deal became a $46 cost. I guess I should have thought that one through. For what it's worth, they never SAID you could easily switch between the two. But, I hate being "incremented". I'll take a half point off for that.
Ok, so onward to assembly. Relatively straightforward though their instructions are pretty poor. No exploded view and not really very clear wording. Parts pictures did not exactly match what was in the package, either. Another half point off.
Got it assembled and mounted it on my bandsaw only to discover that the magswitches that are supposed to hold the base to the steel/iron table are a little too long and the whole assembly moves around when "locked" down. Ugh. I never noticed this before with the feather board in place because it wasn't critical for that application. But in a resaw fence, it absolutely is. I used 6 layers of blue tape to shim it up enough so the magnets pull the base plate tight against the table. Pretty disappointing that it doesn't just work. A full point off.
I will give them credit for having a halfway decent mechanism for adjusting the fence parallel to the blade. Especially since having to shim it, I made it a little off vertical. So, I got it ready to test out.
My first try didn't go so well but that's my fault for letting the bottom of the board drift a bit. So I clamped a piece of wood to the table to prevent that and resawed a 6" piece of alder. Nice clean job. Being able to change the angle of the board to account for blade drift allowed me to keep it within a 1/16" of my line. Not bad at all.
Then I resawed a piece of 7/8" bubinga. I have been dreading this as it's got some really nice grain and I didn't want to mess it up. I wanted to have 2 3/8" pieces for a box I'm making my wife for Valentines day so the stakes were kind of high. On one edge, I scribed two lines 13/32" from each side of the board. This gave me a 1/16" "channel" for the cut and 1/32" on each side to plane off. Not much margin for error here. With the new fence, I was able to stay between the lines and the cut was so clean, I am tempted to just scrape it down and call it good.
So, once it is set up, it is a really nice resaw fence. Since it works so well, I gave 1/2 point back. But, I really do hate it when a company has a great concept but misses out on some rather obvious issues. MagSwitch should look at Incra to see how it's done.
Even with all my complaints, I recommend this product for resawing. Once you get it working, it really does a good job.
MagSwitch Resaw Attachment 3.5/5.
