Hi all,

hope everyone had a good weekend!

Well, the in-laws came into town yesterday so I got a little time in the garage (aka - the shop). Decided I'd fine tune the saw to prepare for my first "real" furniture project as everything to now has been for the shop or outdoors. I checked squareness of miter slot to the blade, squared the miter guage using my engineer square, checked blade parallel to slot, and finally the fence was squared.

When I went to make a test cut I just crosscut a 1x3 piece of oak w/factory edge. After cut I put the two pieces side by side w/one side inverted to check for squareness. Unfortunately it is not. Went back to check blade and it seems good.

What I'm suspecting at this point is the belts or casters. The reason i'm suspecting this and not the arbor is that I've been succesful with the test cut method mentioned above before. After sitting there and trying to figure out what may have happened I thought of the Zero Clearance Plate I installed last week. During the initial saw through of the plate I had a 2x4 of Fir clamped above the plate to hold it down. As I was slowly raising the blade the plate began to smoke from the friction and so I stopped the saw right in the middle of the plate and the 2x4 (I know , I know). I'm suspecting that this may be the cause of the problem. While I can't detect any runout on the blade by checking the same tooth on the front and back I suspect that when the blade is running at full speed there may be a little play or wobble. At the same time, the blade is still contacting the zero plate.

Can anyone provide any tips as to how I can determine what may be the issue and more importantly - how i can possibly fix it? I hope that I may not have ruined this saw as I will not be able to afford another one any time soon. BTW, it's a jet contractor's saw.

Thanks in advance for any help y'all can provide!!

Delano