Powermatic Reviews

I bought this fence to go with my new Grizzly 1023SL cabinet saw, which is my very first table saw, just because a friend could get me a discount on it. I figured since it was Made in USA and had the Micro-adjust feature, it would be a nice upgrade from the Chinese made Shop Fox Classic fence that came with the Grizzly saw. The rails from that fence would have bolted right on my saw, instead of drilling holes in my brand new saw for the HTC rails.

I know I'm picky about my tools, but it drives me nuts when I see obvious flaws in a premium "commercial grade" product that experts in the field have designed and has been in production several years. Isn't the whole point of buying a piece of commercially available equipment like this to get one that has been perfected? Consumers shouldn't have to troubleshoot and re-engineer products like this! Can't THEY see these problems, which are quite obvious and easy to fix?

Here are the problems I had with my HTC-900, in order of importance.

1. The design of the adjustment "mechanism" that sets the fence parallel with the miter slots is inadequate! This one adjustment, above all others, is the heart of the modern T-style table saw fence, and should be flawless.

The adjustment is made by two set screws, one on either end of the T, but they push against a "leaf-spring" kind of thing that has a plastic pad glued to the spring to protect the paint on the rail. What's so bad about that? With the set screws adjusted so the fence LOCKS DOWN PARALLEL to the miter slots, the set screws on my fence don't always bear against the leaf springs. That means when I unlock the fence, the one leaf spring "springs back" which pushes the fence way out of parallel with the blade, making fine adjustments a pain in the rear!

No wonder this fence comes with the micro-adjust feature. It NEEDS it!! Otherwise, you'd never be able to make a small adjustment repeatably.

I've seen other HTC (and JET which are apparently also made by HTC) fences at the local tool shop that don't have this problem. Also, Biesemeyer and other name brands are made in essentially the same way. So maybe I just got "lucky" enought to have this problem on my fence. Although I have heard this complaint from other people about other brands too. It would be so easy to change the design to fix this. What's the holdup?!

2. The two large nylon set screws that adjust the perpendicularity of the face of the fence to the table in the vertical direction are just loosely threaded into their holes. You can make the adjustment, but how long will it stay that way? The screws turn with bare fingers, there's no way to lock the adjustment in place, and the instructions make no mention of using loc-tite or any other product to do so. Why not use slightly longer set screws and jam nuts? Why didn't they think of that? A couple jam nuts would have cost them less than 50 cents.

3. I was trying to use a dial gauge to set my fence perfectly parallel with the miter slots, but the dial gauge was dipping and diving on both sides of zero the full length of the fence. I think this is because the clip-on design of the fence faces distorts the plastic faces. I haven't investigated this enough yet to be sure that's the root cause. This sounds like a minor annoyance, but it is an important one. It's hard to tune the saw to be safe if you can't get a good reading! Maybe Biesemeyer was onto something with their laminated birch faces, permanently mounted to the fence. Seems old-fashioned in comparison, but modern conveniences aren't always as good as they first appear. Maybe this is a prime example.

4. There is a small socket head bolt that holds the locking saddle in the main fence housing when you pick the fence up off the rail. Problem is the head is so tall it was digging into the rail when I locked the fence in position. Luckily, it had a lock washer under the head of the bolt, so I just removed the washer and used loc-tite. Another easy fix. Why didn't they think of that?

5. Bought HTC long rails to go with it. Front angle iron that supports the rail, the most important one, had a bow in it. Nice. Not a big one, but still annoying. Maybe 1/8" or so. I know it's a long piece of metal, but I paid about $150 for three pieces of painted metal that are supposed to be STRAIGHT, not more or less straight.

6. The cam to lock the fence is painted. First time I torqued it down, it mostly wasn't anymore. Why did they do that?! Also, there were large burrs on the hole that was drilled to support the locking lever pivot, which made the locking mechanism feel like a rock crusher.

7. The Micro-adjust is the only real reason to even look at this fence, but the burr created by the threads on the end of the stud in the Kipp handle digs nice circular holes through the paint job on the rail every time you tighten it down to use the micro-adjust feature. I had to sand mine flat to save the paint job on my rails. An easy fix and works fine now. Why didn't they think of that?

8. Instructions for mounting rails on a saw not specifically made for the HTC rails were not-existent. I had to make it up as I went along. Remember I said this was my first saw? I had the front rail on perfectly (to my satisfaction that is), starting on the rear rail when the hole pattern in the rear rail made me notice the front one was upside down and backwards. I had intentionally laid it out that way not knowing exactly how it went, because the other orientations made the hole patterns (actually, the bolts that would pass through holes) run into several objects I wanted to avoid under the table, like casting webs. The same hole pattern was on both legs of the angle iron, so what would it matter? I thought USD and backwards would be fine, until I tried to mount the rectangular tube to the angle iron. OOPS, won't go that way.

Why is it so difficult to put some decent instructions together? It would easily fit on the same number of pages if printed front and rear, so cost isn't the issue. Admittedly, this is partly due to my ignorance about table saws. On the other hand, they know darn well these rails are going on some saws that weren't designed specifically for them, and the installer will be drilling holes in an expensive table saw. So give me some guidance on installation pitfalls. At least tell me what NOT to do and point me in the right direction, would ya?!

If you are in this situation, check out the Biesemeyer website, which has excellent instructions for mounting rails to any saw. I wish I had visited their website before I installed my HTC rails. It would have saved me several hours of rework.