I started putting this beast together this morning, right after a trip to Lowes to pick up 10 ft of 10/3 power cord.
One of the first things I noticed about this saw was the "4 inch dust port". Not so much. The connection on the back of the saw is for a 4" pipe, but that is just bolted onto the cabinet centered over a 3" hole. The flex pipe on the inside that goes to the blade shroud is 3". I can see no way to make that any bigger. Hopefully, it will get the job done.
So on to bigger and better things.
First up was installing the sliding table. That was pretty easy, but there is not a lot of room under there to add the one nut on each end that holds the sliding table assembly to the base.
The nut in the center is threaded onto a t-bolt that fits into a t-slot in the slding table base. I had to shim the sliding table up about 3/8" to get the washer, lock washer and nut under the end of the t-bolt.
In the first picture you can see a small allen head bolt screwed into the underside of the sliding table base. That is a stop that positions the sliding table base on the saw cabinet. Absolutely no mention of that in the manual. As a matter of fact, there is nothing in the manual that says exactly where the sliding table base should be postitioned. The manual just says to mount it and tighten the the nuts. Oh well, I'm glad that Grizzly put the small bolt in there and that I found it.
Next were the extension tables. There is a small table that bolts to the back side of the main cast iron table and a second, larger table that bolts to the right side of the main. The manual says to bolt the extention table(s) to the main table and then add the set screws that are used to level the extension(s). This seemed backwards to me, so I screwed the set screws in first, with the table(s) upside down on the bench, then mounted the tables to the main.
And here it is with the slider and both extension tables mounted.
Next was installation of the rip fence. The rip fence system consists of a fence scale, fence rail and fence base. The fence scale is bolted to the main and right side extension tables then the fence rail is bolted right beside the fence scale. All of this went very nice and easy.
Then the real fun began. I could not get the fence base to slide smoothly on the rail. The rail would bind to the point where I could barely move it. There is a note in the manual for this very occurrance.
"The fence should slide smoothly; if it doesn't, remove the fence base and adjust the spring pressure plate mounting position on the fence base (See figure 23)."
That is the entire explanation. There is nothing in the manual that explains how to do this. After some time messing with it, I found out that there is a steel rod that holds a cam that the fence handle screws into. I removed that rod and that provided access to the 2 screws that that held the spring pressure plate. I adlusted the spring pressure plate, re-assembled the fence base and tried it again. It was still binding. I tried this several times with no success. Finally I just removed the spring pressure plate alltogether. Now I could move the fence and still lock it down. But the fence still does not slide smoothly or evenly. It is binding a little here and there and it kind of chatters as it slides. At this point I am not sure if there is a problem with the fence design, or if I simply got a bad fence set up. I will have to contact Grizzly to find out how to correct this problem.
I did go ahead and mount the rip fence for now.
Next was the cross cut table and fence. This also went prettly smoothly, although, there are two sets of four holes on the bottom side of the crosscut table, and the manual says to mount the support leg to the cross cut table without mentioning which set of four holes to use (other than a not too clear picture). I'm not really sure what the second set of holes could be used for. The set I did use is closer to the center of the table, The other set is close to the edge (but not down by the river, YES reference, sorry)
So here is the cross cut table and fence installed with the two flip stops mounted to the cross cut fence.
And that is about as far as I got today. Should be able to finish up and power up tomorrow, if I don't run into any more significant problems.
