The Sears/ Delta molding head

[Cherryville Chuck]

And maybe Rockwell too. I bought this tool probably around 40 years ago and every so often I need it for a job. Yesterday it was making more brick mold to trim a window on my shop. I needed to replace two partial pieces after tearing down the root cellar that was at the back of my shop. It only takes a few minutes to do with the molding head and it does a beautiful job of it. I also made the frame for the painting in the 3rd picture years ago by using different bits and multiple cuts. I can't remember if I also used a router. It was quite a few years ago when I made it. I see one of these tools for sale at times on marketplace and ebay, usually fairly cheap. Corob Cutters still makes bits for them. They are a lot handier tool than most people gave them credit for being.

[Stick486]

nice work Charles...
I have one of those...
it scares me...
it's still new after 40~50 years...

[Cherryville Chuck]

They look and sound intimidating but there is usually very little bit exposed and lots of wood between you and the cutters. At least when used on a table saw. They were originally intended to be used with radial arm saws. If you were making something like the picture frame shown where the entire face is profiled there would be no surface to rest on the saw top on a table saw. You can get around that by leaving some wood on the outside edges and cutting it off after. On the brick molding I left a little wood between the edge and first bead and turned them on their sides and cut a rabbet to get rid of it with the regular blade back on.

[HandyDan]

I have one that was given to me. Never liked the idea it only used one cutter. Never used it.

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[Cherryville Chuck]

I have one that was given to me. Never liked the idea it only used one cutter. Never used it.


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I'm going to guess that it was meant for under powered saws, like the 6" dado set was meant for. I never liked the idea either. More cutters need more power but give a smoother cut. I know I bought mine from Sears, likely when it was on sale. I rarely bought any tools from them that weren't on sale.

[HandyDan]

I'm going to guess that it was meant for under powered saws, like the 6" dado set was meant for.

A friend of mine gave it to me after his father died. His dad used it on a radial arm saw. Scares me just saying it.

[DaninVan]

nice work Charles...
I have one of those...
it scares me...
it's still new after 40~50 years...

Ditto! Me too!! Mine's like almost brand new.

[DaninVan]

They look and sound intimidating but there is usually very little bit exposed and lots of wood between you and the cutters. At least when used on a table saw. They were originally intended to be used with radial arm saws. If you were making something like the picture frame shown where the entire face is profiled there would be no surface to rest on the saw top on a table saw. You can get around that by leaving some wood on the outside edges and cutting it off after. On the brick molding I left a little wood between the edge and first bead and turned them on their sides and cut a rabbet to get rid of it with the regular blade back on.

I just remembered; that's exactly why mine was barely used. Having it on the RA saw scared the crap out of me, and I didn't have a TS back then.

[Cherryville Chuck]

I don't know if I would have had the guts to use it on an RA either. Maybe with a full guard around it.

[Stick486]

Maybe with a full guard around it.

and no power to the saw....

[Biagio]

Actually my DeWalt RAS had a special guard specifically for that head. Needed a specific fence, as well. There was no blade exposure at all, when correctly set. But once I built my first router table I stopped using it, and gave it to the guy I sold my RAS to, two years ago. Again, most of the blades were unused (but so a quite a few of my router bits).

[Bushwhacker]

Speaking of Tools that scare the s**t out of you to use. When I retired from the Army, I went to work for this old fellow who had a one-man remodeling company.
He had a scar that run from under his chin through is mouth and upper lip to next to the side of his nose.
He told the story of having a Radial Arm saw that had a dial on it to add speed to the blade.
He was in his shop at home and he had this thing cranked all the way up. All of a sudden the blade came off and hit him in the lower jaw. It stuck there. He walked to the street in front of his house and flagged a car down, this guy took him to the ER to have it removed.
We had a job to remodel a rec room at a mobile home park is south Austin Texas. He had me and my buddy set the shop up so we could work from one machine to the next around the room as we built cabinets and doors. He still had this same radial arm saw with the speed dial on it.
When he cranked it up to full speed, it would scream like a jet warming up.
After 22 years in the Infantry and two tours in Vietnam, I have done some hairy and scary stuff, but I would not touch that radial arm saw

Bushwhacker

[Cherryville Chuck]

That's odd. The nut on saw arbors are supposed to thread on so that if there is any slippage, the nut will attempt to tighten itself. On saws with the nut on the left side of the blade it will be left hand thread and if the nut is on the right it will be right hand thread. It must not have had any kind of guard around the blade either.

[Bushwhacker]

The fact that it had no guard scared me too. It was an old saw and he had run it without the guard when it came off and hit him.
I agree about the threads of the nut should hold it on if it came loose.

Bushwhacker

[DaninVan]

Actually my DeWalt RAS had a special guard specifically for that head. Needed a specific fence, as well. There was no blade exposure at all, when correctly set. But once I built my first router table I stopped using it, and gave it to the guy I sold my RAS to, two years ago. Again, most of the blades were unused (but so a quite a few of my router bits).

Hey; Welcome back, Biagio! Your absence has been noted...
I hope you've not been unwell(?).
My own DeWalt RA saw has been unused and gathering dust for at least 20 years now.

[Cherryville Chuck]

Actually my DeWalt RAS had a special guard specifically for that head. Needed a specific fence, as well. There was no blade exposure at all, when correctly set. But once I built my first router table I stopped using it, and gave it to the guy I sold my RAS to, two years ago. Again, most of the blades were unused (but so a quite a few of my router bits).

I thought I remembered a guard for that head. Some of my bits for it are unused too. The door lip and panel raising bits and tongue and groove set. RAS or TS, you'd have to rig up aids to do those jobs like adding a layer on the RAS to lift the piece up off the main table or making a tall fence for the TS.

[Cherryville Chuck]

Actually my DeWalt RAS had a special guard specifically for that head. Needed a specific fence, as well. There was no blade exposure at all, when correctly set. But once I built my first router table I stopped using it, and gave it to the guy I sold my RAS to, two years ago. Again, most of the blades were unused (but so a quite a few of my router bits).

Hey; Welcome back, Biagio! Your absence has been noted...
I hope you've not been unwell(?).
My own DeWalt RA saw has been unused and gathering dust for at least 20 years now.

The proliferation of chop saws and then sliders made the RAS obsolete. I see them on marketplace for $20-25 bucks at times. I think I saw one where the guy was giving it away.

[Biagio]

[/quote]
Hey; Welcome back, Biagio! Your absence has been noted...
I hope you've not been unwell(?).
My own DeWalt RA saw has been unused and gathering dust for at least 20 years now.
[/quote]

Thanks, Dan. I am reluctant to state how well I am - Treasury is always looking for something extra to tax here, and any day now they will tax wellness as a fringe benefit.
Have just been very busy. Post-Covid, half the world seems to be having mental health issues, and my profession is in short supply, at least locally. We are also faced with a steady exodus of younger professionals, thanks to an entire political class of what Cherryville Chuck would call Ass-hats, except that ours are venal carpetbaggers to whom shame is an unknown concept.

@Cherryville Chuck , on the RAS the head was used with the motor in the vertical position, sort of an upside-down router table set-up. The workpiece was flat on the table, but the fence needed to have a cutout to accommodate the cutter head. The head came with two brackets which had to be screwed onto the fence on either side of the cutout (fence had to be a 2 by) to mount some rather Heath-Robinson flat spring-steel hold-downs.
They did not work that well.
The guard had a fixed and an adjustable part, the latter could be lowered right down to the work-piece, completely shielding the cutter head, and providing some hold-down function. The motor axis could be tilted, allowing some interesting variations that one would need a tilting table router table to emulate.
On the plus side, there was the beefy 2 1/4 Hp induction motor (compared to the 1 1/4 Hp of my first 1/4” Hitachi router). On the minus side was the low rpm - the finish was not wonderful, especially with locally available woods. So the router won.

[Biagio]

@Cherryville Chuck
Regarding obsolescence, I must say that for my needs, the RAS served me very well for over 40 years. I was first impressed by adverts for the “DeWalt Powershop” and the Shopsmith in handed down copies of Popular Mechanics and the like, in early adolescence. In those days, the USA led the world, or so it seemed. But I was really sold on the idea by a book, “The Magic of your Radial Arm Saw” by De Cristoforo - gave the book to the purchaser of the RAS two years back. A friend and I each bought a DeWalt (in those days, our currency was king), and we made quite a few of De Cristoforo’s jigs. I always observed the safety rules to the letter, and never had a scary moment, even when using a wobble-washer dado blade, that most people consider evil.

I decided to replace it for a couple of reasons: it occupied a lot of floor space in a small room; the rip width was limited; the alignment required frequent checking and adjusting, and was a PIA to do; changing from right to left mitre was cranky, because of the stiffness of the mechanism; and the dust was a disaster. Also, it was impractical and dangerous to try and do box-joint cuts, particularly with a dado set.
Fast forward. Replaced, for about the same floor space, with a Bosch glider and Bosch table saw (like the 4100 you have in North America, but with a built-in sliding table). The glider is great: accurate out the box, easy to swing mitres, but 13” cross-cut instead of 24 , dust still a disaster.The table saw is also good in many ways, even has an extendable out feed support, good fence (but not Biesemeyer). But the sliding table has non-adjustable play, the mitre slots are proprietary, the mitre gauge has play within the already-sloppy sliding table, and is too thin to drill and tap it for adjusting grub screws. I can’t believe that Bosch did not make the sliding table adjustable, will have to wait another year to end of warranty before I take it apart to try and remedy. As for the mitre gauge bar, I will have to try and find somebody to mill me one.
But the biggest let-down was the 30mm arbor. Until just very recently, that meant no dado set was possible (and may still be the case). CMT has recently released an EU- conforming dado set with 30mm bore, but am waiting to hear whether it is compatible with the Bosch, as the 30 mm arbor is actually a flange only about 4 mm wide, I.e just enough for one saw blade, and preferably thin-kerf. I believe there is a conversion kit available in the US to convert to 5/8 bore arbor, and I was contemplating getting one, but hopefully CMT have the answer.

I must say that contrary to most of the opinions expressed, here and on the other forum, I felt far safer using the RAS than the TS. The first thing I did was get a bunch of Microjig Grripper stuff, to be sure I am nowhere near the blade - was never an issue on the RAS. Never ever used it without the blade guard on, and although the anti-kickback was a real pain to use, it worked. With the TS, I thought the apparel worn by your viral lady shop teacher might be a necessary safeguard in case of kickbacks.

[Cherryville Chuck]

In the second picture it shows what I thought would be necessary to use the head, i.e. an auxiliary table so to speak that lifts the work higher. It would either be that or drill a hole in the existing table for the nut and washer to go down into. The picture of the guard jogged my memory. I know Ive seen it in ads. I used an RAS before I got a TS too. It often needed truing and it could be a real chore to level the table too. When I moved to Alberta for 9 years we needed to do some renos on the place we bought while over there so I bought one of those portable saws like yours from Sears. Same issue with the miter gauge and slot. I also had to measure back and front of the fence before making a cut and usually readjust a few times before I'd get it good enough. I gave it to a friend of my kids when we moved back and was glad to see it go.

I don't know if you remember a member on the old forum named Phil Pritchard but he said they made short arbors purposely on Euro destined saws. He said the safety authorities don't like dado heads for some reason. Can you not get bushings to reduce from 30mm to 5/8"? My 12" blades have one to go from 1" to 5/8".

I was watching the local auction yesterday and they had a couple of miter saw stands in the sale and I had the idea that I could add wheels and a shelf at the base and put my shop vac and a cyclone on it and build a shroud around the back of the saw and that would get it off my bench and take care of the dust problem at the same time. Someone wanted them more than I did unfortunately but I think that's a winning idea so I'm on the lookout for one now.

As for the confused shop teacher, he can't possibly see what is down and directly in front of him and I see that as a severe safety hazard. Gratefully he is no longer in the news for now.

[Biagio]

Charles, the workpiece is flat on the table - you can see the scoring cuts from normal cross-cutting. The guy is making a raised panel. He is using a pretty low fence, otherwise he would have had to have a lower segment in the middle to accommodate the head. I may still have mine lying around, if so will take a photo.
I don’t know about other makes, but my DeWalt had a three-piece table. The front, larger piece, was held by screws from below through some steel angle sections, which could be adjusted for leveling. The rear sections of the table, I.e. between the column and the fence, were held in place in compression by some poorly-designed brackets and thumb-screws - the idea was that you could move the fence back some 1 1/2” for some specific cuts. But very fiddly to use - you needed hands like those off-set spanners used for in-table collet tightening. One of the two mfd pieces had a cutout in it straight from the factory, to accommodate the spindle, nut and washer. I didn’t bother with the cutout when I replaced the table - less sawdust to fall through.

The problem with the EU saws is a standard 30mm “ arbor” - more like a 30mm x 4mm disc, on which the blade sits. There is no 5/8 to reduce to. All my RAS blades had 5/8 bores, I had to give them away. That is why I was interested in replacing the arbor altogether, and may still have to do so.
Several reasons have been advanced as to why the EU does not like dado sets, among others that they are used without a guard in a TS (health and safety) and that the mass would make it harder to stop the blade in the specified time on shut-off (they do stop remarkably quickly). Most of the portable saws do not have have a removable riving knife - it can only be moved up (to attach a blade guard) or down, level with the top of the blade.

Somehow CMT has pulled it off, and has developed the first EU approved set, incorporating some nifty features that stop the blades rotating in relation to each other - check the CMT site. But I still don’t see how the stack will sit on a 4mm ledge, in the case of my saw. Waiting to hear from them.

[Cherryville Chuck]

I can't get your photos to enlarge for a better loo. I'm not sure how you loaded them. I can see using the raised panel cutters like that but the ones I was specifically thinking about were the cabinet door radiused lip bits, the rail and stile ones, and the T & G ones where you'd need the cutter right at table level. Those get tricky too because you are cutting the entire edge of the board and leaving no surface to reference from as you finish the cuts. I don't recall using an RAS with the factory cutout in it. Mostly we saw DeWalts, Deltas, and the Sears ones which could have been either of the first two.

They really don't want you doing anything with your TS they didn't anticipate it sounds. I could be wrong but I suspect that most users here removed the splitter, guard, anti kickback assembly the first time they were making a groove instead of a through cut and it never went back on the saw again. With my outfeed table installed it can't go back on now. The only solution is an overarm assembly which I've been considering since it also can incorporate dust control coming off the top of the blade. The dust control in the cabinet is next to useless. The cabinet fills up whether you have the DC turned on or not.

[Biagio]

The photos were from the internet - I no longer have the item or the book.
I take your point about edge moulding, and somewhere inside a spaghetti-bowl of neuronal connections, I seem to remember that De Cristoforo had a design for a raised table in his book. Never made it, as I moved to a router and table.