General Upgrades & Ideas

[Bo Diddley]

What was the size of the wiring that fed the hot tub? I'm thinking it should be 6/3 copper with a ground.

[wuapinmon]

50 Amp scares me. I'd pay a professional to do that kind of work. Revolting, I know, but I've been shocked before and it hurt like hell and left me confused for days (I was a teenager).

[Pelado]

What was the size of the wiring that fed the hot tub? I'm thinking it should be 6/3 copper with a ground.

Correct. $8.60 per foot.

[Pelado]

50 Amp scares me. I'd pay a professional to do that kind of work. Revolting, I know, but I've been shocked before and it hurt like hell and left me confused for days (I was a teenager).

I used to think the same.

[Bo Diddley]

Correct. $8.60 per foot.

Good. Sounds like you did your homework. Let us know how the bandsaw upgrade works.

[Moliere]

I'll do simple wiring myself, like running a 110/220 line from the subpanel to a new plug, but there's no way I'd ever try to install a subpanel or deal with stuff behind the breaker. The good thing about electrical stuff is that it's so failsafe now that you likely can't screw it up too bad unless you just aren't using the right gauge of wiring, but it'd still be afraid of burning my house down.

I had my garage shop redone this past spring. I had a contractor tear out the drywall and hang 3/4 plywood on the walls. I also had an electrician put in a larger subpanel and I now have four 220 outlets (table saw, bandsaw, planer, jointer) and 6 or 7 110 outlets (clusters of 4). It's so nice to have electrical everywhere in the shop and having 220 machines is night and day different in the power they provide and the ease of use. Laguna is having a sale on their machines and their bandsaw is pretty nice, so you might just check that out and get a new one

Last weekend I picked up a new table saw. I got the 30 inch Sawstop. It took a couple hours to get it all setup but I'm already loving it much more than my cheap dewalt saw I've had for about 7 years. I wanted to get a bigger saw but I just can't fit anything bigger in my small garage shop...plus I don't ever cut anything bigger than 30 inches on my tablesaw since I can just rip things down with a tracksaw if I need big pieces. Handling a full sheet of plywood on a table saw is also just not something I like to do.

My next upgrade will be a 20 inch planer. I'm still waiting to pull the trigger on that as the cost has gotten a bit too high to swallow right now. The Powermatic planer I'm looking at runs about $6,500 and it'll probably hit around $7,000 with shipping. It also weighs something like 800 lbs.

[Pelado]

New? I don't do that.

Were you using the DeWalt jobsite saw like mine? I've been thinking about upgrading to something better but also have space concerns. The used market has lots of Craftsman 113 saws and - lately, a few Unisaws - available for relatively cheap but they lack riving knives, rack-and-pinion fences, and dust collection - which is a big part of why I went with the DeWalt in the first place.

SawStop makes some really nice stuff, but they also want lots of cash for their machines.

[Moliere]

I had a Ridgid professional saw. I’d highly recommend it if you have space issues and just need a 110 saw. I made some pretty cool stuff with it. I took the time to dial in the accuracy of it by aligning the blade and the miter slots and a couple other things. Once it was dialed in, it cut true pretty much all the time.