My SawStop PCS tablesaw has a pretty fussy riving knife adjustment system. You have to crank the blade up to check alignment and then crank it back down to be able to adjust the bolts and of course every time you tighten the bolts you move the knife out of alignment. So back and forth you go crank, loosen, align, crank, tighten, crank, loosen, align,... Then once you’ve got it just right, and you crank the blade back down to a reasonable height to cut some 3/4” plywood the knife seems out of alignment. What gives!?
Turns out that the knife holder isn’t exactly tilted in the same plane as the saw blade. It’s off by the slightest half of a degree. That doesn’t sound like much, but when the difference between the kerf and the riving knife is measured in .001”, that’s huge. If you have this problem it will seem like either you have to push harder to push the workpiece past the riving knife or the workpiece seems to want to drift away from the fence and cause burns along the cut. I had the latter problem. SawStop surprisingly has no mechanism to adjust the tilt. What I did to fix this was to add a couple of pieces of tape as shims to tilt the knife in the opposing direction as in the photos below.
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| Adding blue tape to the upper clap area |
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| Adding blue tape to the lower clamp area on the opposite side |
4 comments:
I know this is a few years old now, but I figured I'd post anyway...
I just picked up a new PCS175 and I'm having the same problem: the knife mount is slightly tilted to the right and isn't in the same plane as the blade. Did you ever follow-up with Sawstop support about this, or did you just live with your tape solution? I reached out to the support team and they are sending me a new knife mount and riving knife, so I'll see what happens and report back. They said that it sounded like something hit the riving knife during shipping and bent the bracket, since I also mentioned to them that my riving knife wasn't perfectly flat.
Reporting back: the replacement mounting bracket and knife did not resolve the issue. After much back and forth with Sawstop support (we tried a few other things to resolve the issue), Sawstop decided to just swap the saw out with a new one. I haven't received the new one yet, but I imagine it will be fine. If the same issue is on the new one I'll definitely be posting another comment here.
I have a Saw Stop with exactly the same problem. Your tape shim worked for me as well. Thanks for the post.
I'm glad my post was able to help.
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