Has anyone checked out this radial saw mortiser?

[BrianSimmons]

Just wonder your thoughts and if any of you have seen this in use.

http://woodworker.com/cgi-bin/FULLPRES.exe?PARTNUM=889-372

Quite a bit cheaper than a Makita mortiser even if you need to buy the radial arm saw!

[flyingparks]

I realize this is old. Looks pretty slick if you ask me. I've thought of the RAS as being a great timber framing tool, especially for cutting tenons. But portability is the obvious issue. How long wood it take to get the heavy timber setup? It's much easier to bring the machine to the wood in our case. But yea, $1700 for the Makita is an expense I have put off for now. Did you end up getting this attachment Mr Simmons? The price is right. No experience with it on my end.

[Roger Nair]

So it would take eight plunges to make a two inch wide mortise 2 3/8 long not even close to a full sized mortise.  Super hassle to position the timber.  Plus I hate the mention of RAS for just about anything other than crosscut work.

[flyingparks]

So I take it you haven't used it.  :D I'm with you. Too many cuts, although I have used a RAS for ripping and it works pretty well...as long as you dial it in. One of these days I'll bite the bullet and get a chain mortiser. For now the Snell works great.

[BarnMB]

it is not worth buying. Due to the fact that the mortiser is only one chainsaw blade wide it has a lot of deflection. As Roger mentioned it takes far to many cuts also. I have often wanted to make the "machine" in this video. Hope it works not sure if it was added correctly. On his updated one he no longer uses the Woodworker Mortiser. If you search Jeff Dean timber jig you can find picture of the updated one.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX7bUf_oJJQ

[Brian_Weekley]

Plus I hate the mention of RAS for just about anything other than crosscut work.

There is always the camp that believes the RAS is inherently dangerous for anything but cross-cutting.  Unfortunately, the biggest reasons are that people use the wrong blade on the RAS, do not have the machine properly aligned and adjusted, or don't know how to perform the operation correctly and safely.

[Roger Nair]

Well...I'm not one in anyone's camp.  I look at power tools and think about force and reaction.  Across all the various classes of power saws a common features are a table, a blade, clamps and fence.  A table saw's blade imparts a force downward to an unmovable table and towards the operator and the RAS lifts the workpiece away from the table with feed on the upturning side of the blade and feeding from the other direction can result in the saw grabbing and galloping.  It's best use, imo, is as a cutoff in used in a repeated, jigged up and clamped down manner.  That is my own safety check, when things go wrong with power  tools, there is no meaningful reaction time, it's over the next instant.