Crafts­man 207.25530 Elec­tric Hand Saw

I recently had the oppor­tu­nity to try out this handy lit­tle skill saw on the Bun­galoft remodel project. I had a few pieces of ply­wood to cut so I gave it a spin.

The saw has a great retro look with its all alu­minum case. It has a nice feel to the alu­minum han­dle and the switch falls right into place under your index fin­ger. The well thought out front knob fits neatly into the palm of your hand and makes you feel like a car­pen­ter before you have even switched on the saw. It’s plenty beefy too — good for hold­ing down that pesky warped plywood.

The Sears Crafts­man Model 207.25530 comes with a really cool, all-metal, lift-top case that includes a stor­age area under­neath the saw for man­u­als, blades and tools. So, before com­menc­ing work, I con­sulted the blade col­lec­tion to  the proper one for the task.

Find­ing the right blade.

Right on the back of a blade sleeve is this handy blade selec­tion chart. Just go down the list until you find the right choice.  Looks like the Chromedge Ply Tooth blade should make the cut. Using the con­ve­niently sup­plied wrench pair, I installed the blade and set up to make the first slice.  Much to their credit, Sears chose to keep the cost of the blade low by avoid­ing the unnec­es­sary extrav­a­gance of car­bide tips or the addi­tional expense of pro­vid­ing ade­quate set to the steel blade teeth. So it’s use­ful to keep a wedge handy to pre­vent blade from bind­ing in the saw kerf just in case the wood has a bit of personality.

Depth of cut adjustment

After set­ting blade depth with this cool, chrome-plated adjust­ment knob, I plugged in the saw and let her rip. The saw cut nicely with only a lit­tle bit of smoke emerg­ing from the cut. Sure enough, the wedge came in handy to help com­plete the cut. All-in-all, a sat­is­fac­tory expe­ri­ence right out of the box.

For every­one from the week­end wood butcher to the McMan­sion­ista, this tool deliv­ers with­out com­plaint. If you can get your hands on one of these pup­pies you won’t be disappointed.

I always won­dered how an M&M was made. Even as a kid, I couldn’t help won­der­ing how they got that sugar coat­ing so per­fectly formed around that choco­late core. Every time … ! I don’t think I ever found one that showed any sign of actu­ally hav­ing been made by a real per­son. I never have been able to tour that M&M fac­tory but I did fig­ure out how to make a few other things. So I decided now it’s time to see what I can share about mak­ing stuff — and per­haps see what I can learn as well.

I’ll start with this:

These cam­eras entailed more trick­ery than I had orig­i­nally antic­i­pated. (If you are a maker of things, you prob­a­bly just thought to your­self “Imag­ine that!”) Part of that trick­ery evolved from my fate­ful deci­sion to use a lot of curves for this design and to make them from cross-laminated, wood veneer parts.

The back of the cam­era includes a remov­able curved back and a top and bot­tom strip of mate­r­ial that becomes part of the camera’s body. The trick was to make these three parts in a way that would allow them to fit together in the same “plane” while also man­ag­ing the dif­fi­culty of hold­ing the pieces dur­ing fab­ri­ca­tion. The next three pho­tos show the solu­tion I came up with.

This image shows a vac­uum fix­ture for hold­ing the raw part on the left, the gang saw that does the cut­ting and an exam­ple of a raw panel ready to be cut. A rotat­ing fit­ting for the vac­uum line is vis­i­ble at the top of the vac­uum fixture.

This view show the saw gang arbor just past the end of cut. The han­dle vis­i­ble just to the right of the saw arbor would have been used to rotate the vac­uum fix­ture with the part in place past the gang saw while the vac fit­ting on top of the fix­ture allows the vac tube to remain sta­tion­ary. You can see the three parts along with the left­over waste strips at the top and bottom.

Once the basic fix­ture design was checked out, the base of the fix­ture was recon­fig­ured to allow for the attach­ment of a dust collection/safety shroud. A stan­dard shop vac hose con­nects to the port on the right side of the shroud. Just enough of the gang blade set pro­trudes to cut the stock with­out undue risk to the oper­a­tor. As the parts come off of the fix­ture, they were taped together to keep them in grain matched sets. With this fix­ture setup, a whole stack of raw pan­els can be cut into parts (that require only light edge sand­ing) in a very short time.

There nat­u­rally would be many ways of doing this but my par­tic­u­lar pro­ce­dure reflects my own expe­ri­ence and the tools and machines avail­able to me. I am for­tu­nate to have an Aciera milling machine in the shop (that should be a post!) so this pro­ce­dure was largely dri­ven by the milling machine mode of working.

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