Originally Posted by John A langley
I have a 10' SCMI slider at my disposal, it squares up OK for its age, but to me breaking down sheet stock on a slider is like hunting with a club. Its better than some methods, worse than others. I think I'd still be cutting plywood for 2 weeks if it were all done on the slider. They are very versatile, surly a great asset to the custom shop, but that versatility IMO comes at the cost of being great at nothing. A sort of jack of all trades saw. You almost always have to be a specialist to be great at something. I'll probably take heat for saying this out loud, but not likely IME from somebody used to using a vertical saw. I'm talking a Streibig or Hendrick type saw with two horizontal beams and a sliding carriage. The wood enters the saw then never moves during the cut, its the dead wood theory on steroids and it removes one major obstacle to square cuts. On the sliding table saw, you just keep turning the material, and lifting, and turning, and lifting…..my back is starting to hurt just thinking about this. You get stuff square by squaring an edge, then referencing that edge and cutting all the other edges…thats a lot of edges to cut. As it turns out I did all the cross cutting on the slider using the rip fence as stop so at least the two ends should be parallel as much as possible. Easy enough. Plywood hits a cart coming through the door, goes across a TS to another cart..to the slider, to another cart. Never gets actually lifted until its small and ready to assemble. I worked PT in a shop with a big Hendricks vertical saw, it was a revelation. Quick, almost painless, dead square sheet goods without effort. It takes a lot of wall space but not so much floor space. I'm thinking that for any commercial sheet stock based cabinet shop a vertical saw and heavy duty cross cut line with a tiger stop set up for FF parts makes far more sense than a slider to me. Maybe at some volume a CNC trumps that too. I can't think of one thing a slider can do that another machine can't do better and easier, but the slider can do so many things in one package its a very compelling format economically.
All that said, I wouldn't be opposed to doing the whole break down on the slider, but the shop I'm in isn't set up right for that, its a real bear to split length wise, never occurred to them it could do that so they backed it up to a wall and tucked it tight into a corner, made it hard to do anything but cross cut. My next challenge is how to attach several hundred LF of 1/4" thick prefinished textured edge banding to preassembled prefinished boxes. I've got pin nails, brads, glue, clamps….hope.
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Drill your doors on a Blum press and use the Inserta hinges. I promise you you'll kick yourself for not having made the switch years ago
