Telling it like it is

Much to my surprise, the service centre I took the table saw to was quite a pleasant experience. I went in, showed them my receipt, explained the problem and the guy said "let's just get you a new one". He typed up a ticket, gave me a receipt and said a new one would be with me in a couple of weeks time. Kudos to the DeWalt service centre then.

In the continuing dumbing-down of the school system in England, kids are now being allows to use txtspeak to write their answers in exams. There is something so fundamentally wrong with a country that allows this. The defendants of this move have said that it should be allowed because "language changes". Well, yes it does. New words come along, as do alternative spellings. But to wholesale say that "you" can be replaced with "u" and "great" can be replaced with "gr8" is just bollocks. Sorry. Bllks. I'm surprised the kids aren't just allowed to txt message their answers to the teacher's phone directly. Sorry. I meant: Im srprzd tht th kds rnt jst alwd 2 txt msg thr answrs 2 th tchrs phne drct.

Well I called the "customer service" number for my table saw and it turns out there's a service centre right close to where we live. So now I need to take it off the legs and get it in the back of the car to haul it down there for "repair" or replacement. You know - from a factory, this sort of shit shouldn't happen. That measurement is so critical to the design of a table saw that when it's wrong, the whole tool is useless. To be so far out from the factory is really a problem for their QA guys. I'm going to take the thing down to the service centre on wednesday and we'll see what happens. I'm not looking forward to it.

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 th