Lubricating a Table Saw
George VondriskaDescription
George Vondriska provides tips on how to lubricate your table saw to protect it and help its parts move smoothly. A WoodWorkers Guild of America (WWGOA) original video.
If you're anything like me, once you've got dough invested in your woodworking tools, you really wanna protect and make sure they're gonna last a long time. Let me show you something that'll go a long way toward helping your tools be protected and make them work better. What I'm talking about is coating the surfaces of these tools with a dry lubricant like this or like this. This'll do a couple things for us. One is here on the cast iron surface when I spray this on, it's gonna help prevent rust from forming on the surface. Now, I know in some parts of the country, just the ambient humidity can be pretty high. That humidity in the air is enough to get rust on this tabletop. Here where I live there are big temperature swings from winter to summer, along with humidity swings, same thing, that can cause rust on your tabletop. So I'm gonna spray this onto the cast iron top, down into the miter gauge slots. I wanna cover the whole surface. Now remember I said it does a couple things for us. The other thing, in addition to providing protection for the surfaces, is it makes parts move across the surface more easily. So I'm gonna also do the face of the fence. Now, that's never gonna rust, but I wanna make it slippery. I'm gonna do the bar, here, that the fence slides on, make sure I've got a good shot down in the miter gauge slots, and, in fact, here on the bottom of the miter gauge, I'm gonna spray the bar of the miter gauge and the bottom of the head. Now you can also use this stuff down inside the saw, in the inner workings, so any place in the machine where you've got gears and trunnions that are working against each other, remember there's all sorts of sawdust down in there. If you use a wet lubricant, then that's gonna leave some kind of dampness behind. It's easy for the sawdust to stick to that. Over time, it's gonna gum up on you, so you wanna stick to a good dry lubricant on those surfaces. One of the things that's important is that neither of these lubricants have silicone in them. What's important about that is if there's silicone in the lubricant, that silicone is gonna be left behind on the surface, and eventually there's a good chance it could migrate up into your woodworking project. So as simple a job as pushing a piece of wood across this table saw could leave silicone in it. You probably won't even know it's there until you go to put finish on your project and unfortunately what you don't know is that you sort of pre-finished your wood by allowing silicone to migrate from here up into the material and the symptom of that'll be that stain and clear coats won't stick to your material. So you wanna stay away from those silicone-based products. Both of these products are woodworking-specific. They work very, very well. Now, I'm showing you my table saw, here, and how I use it on there. I also spray these products on my band saw, the bed of my planer, the bed of my joiner, even bottom of my router. One place where I really find this helps is that when I'm using my router on a dovetail jig, where it has to slide easily across the comb of the jig, I spray both the dovetail comb and the router base. I spray it on the surface of my router table. Like I said, any place where I'm gonna ask two parts to slide against each other, I like having this lubricant on here. I'll tell you what, if you have never used it on your tools, when you use it for the first time you'll be amazed at how much more easily the parts work and you'll be amazed at how much protection it can add to these cast iron surfaces so they don't start to develop rust on you.
George, have you used Fluid Film? It does not contain silicone.
What product(s) were you using exactly? I couldn`t see the name on your video. Thx
What is the names of the product you used to lubricate your table saw?
I find that the propellant in the spray lubricant has a shelf life (depending on how long it has been been in stock at the distributor or how long you have owned it). So eventually the spray starts to "spit and sputter" leaving "globs" that are hard to buff out. So I find that a paste wax, such as Renaissance Wax, works much better and provides the benefits you are looking for with the spray product. What is your experience? Thanks.
thanks, I've used paste wax before on my table saw, and it works great, but this seems like it's a lot easier and a lot faster - I'll have to give it a try!!
Hi, I have a Dewalt Job Site table saw. I’m not sure what the surface is made of. Do you think I need to lubricate it?
It would be nice if George told us what the heck he's using after singing it's praises!
Can you please post the lubricants and possibly a source for them?