Jet Supersaw Review

by A.J. Hamler

   After several years using a Porter-Cable benchtop table saw in a tiny shop, I finally got a new machine for my new larger shop in our new house, a Jet Supersaw, and I love it to death. The P-C is an excellent machine for limited space, but I can't get over how much nicer a large machine is. Quiet, powerful, and tons more room on the table top. All the parts were well-packed, the manual is well-organized (entirely in English!) and easy to follow, and assembly was a breeze. When finished, the saw was rock-solid and dead-on accurate to my satisfaction right out of the box. What a great saw!

   A Gotcha: After setting the saw, I decided to try it out on some rough cutoffs that I wanted to square up for re-use on some projects. I set the fence, locked it down, made the cut, turned off the saw and prepared to move the fence for the first time to make the second cut. In a repeat of another Forum member's mishap last week with his Biesemeyer, I managed to get blood all over the bright Jet white paint when my thumb got mangled in the fence locking lever.

   The locking lever moves up and down in a somewhat vertical oval slot in the front of the fence. With the locking lever in the down position, that leaves an opening in the slot just perfectly sized for the tip of your (well, my) thumb. Grabbing the lever, my fingers around the bottom of the lever and my thumb on top (like gripping a garden hose), my thumb was just inside this slot, and when I pulled up on the lever, it angled my thumb in farther and neatly snipped a sizable flap off the tip of my thumb. Yes, there was harsh language. Fortunately, once I got the blood wiped off sufficiently to take a good look, I was relieved to see that it wasn't as serious as I originally thought -- it didn't "slice" into the fleshy tip of my thumb, but rather "pared" a layer of thick skin around the tip (like a chunk of thick orange peel) just shy of getting into red meat territory. The loose flap was almost cup-shaped, and flipped right back over the open spot. It seems to already be healing, there's been little bleeding, and it doesn't really even hurt that much.

   Looking at the fence this morning, I saw that my thumb could have gone a good bit deeper into that open slot, so I'm considering myself lucky. Interesting that it's the second fence injury in as many weeks for Ellis Islanders.

   A Gripe: Man, who designs a fence this way? After I band-aided my thumb last night, I made a second cut, and damn if I didn't just about do the same thing all over again with my other hand. The natural position of your hand when raising the lever puts your thumb right up there. What makes it worse is that the lever on this fence locks very tightly, even with only a little downward pressure. To unlock it requires pulling up with a lot of force, usually enough that inertia makes the front end of the fence jump nearly clear of the front rail. In practicing it several times, I nearly flipped the fence over the top of the saw once when it jerked up so hard. Yes, I can grip the lever with my thumb wrapped below near my fingers (like gripping a baseball bat rather than a garden hose), but that gives me less control over jerking it up to hard, hence the natural tendency to put the thumb on top for more control. The solution will be to hold the fence down with one hand, while pulling the lever up with the other.

   The fence is otherwise OK. That is, it was incredibly easy to adjust and square up, moves very smoothly over the table, and seems quite accurate and true in spite of the fact that it doesn't lock in the back. Jet also wised up and has mounted a non-magnifying lens cursor over the scale on the front rail. (They include the magnifying one too for folks who like that distorted view it gives of the scale, but the fence comes with the non-magnifying one already installed.) Still, the fence is just "OK." It'll get the job done, and any detraction it gives this machine is more than outweighed by all the positives.