Parallel means parallel, right ?

With great enthusiasm I finally finshed assembling my new table saw today. I got to page 15 in the manual and started aligning the saw blade. I sorted out the 90° angle fine. The 45° angle took a bit of fiddling, but it came in nicely. Then I got to the super-critical adjustment - is the saw blade parallel to the mitre guage slots? Not to bore you with the details of how a table saw works, but the wood is clamed to the mitre guage which runs in a slot back and forth across the table, from front to back. The saw blade must be parallel with this slot or the tools is essentially useless because it won't cut in a straight line, and it will kick the wood back at you when you try to use it. So with great disappointment, I discovered my saw blade was 3° away from parallel. 'No problem' I thought - 'I'll just adjust it'. Well I fiddled, wrenched, screwed, pressed, pushed and generally finagled as many adjustments as I'm given for this, and came to the conclusion that for whatever reason, at maximum adjustment, my table saw blade is always going to be 3° off. Which makes it useless. My heart sank - this means I'm going to have to deal with so-called "customer services" now. Fuck it all.

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