I second this.
I have labelled my chop saw with a big sticker that says “DEADLY MONSTER!” on it after a particularly scary incident where the stock flipped out because I wasn’t holding it down properly… a moment of too much confidence.
I loath the thing now and have put it on a shelf, and instead use my lovely bandsaw and put up with slower and sometimes wavy cuts. There’s something to be said for a saw that only has cutting forces in one direction… downwards.
A repeat, but the best advice I ever got in shop class:
Before any operation on a power tool, count to 10 on your fingers whispering to yourself as you review each and every aspect of the operation, considering the forces the machine applies, in consideration of the fact that you want to be able to repeat that count when the machine is switched off.
My father-in-law’s old Craftsman is still in the basement shop of my mother-in-law’s — the subject of a recall, it could even now have parts removed from it to disable it to get a refund from Sears — at some point that will have to be done I guess, but until then, it’s a monument to the potential dangers of power tools.
A lesson i got early on with a sliding chop saw was to take a proper stance. If you are right handed it means knees slightly bent, right foot back, left foot forward, left hand or clamp holding stock, right hand pushing the saw through the cut. You want to be balanced with weight a bit forward so you can counter the saw’s tendency to kick if the cut binds. And like Will said you want to take into account the forces the machine applies.
I put a fence in last summer and probably made well over a thousand cuts. And i did have at least one heart pounding moment when the saw did not do what was expected (my fault) and actually cracked the solid aluminum casting. Thank goodness for big box stores generous return policies and i think my adherence to good posture and placement of hands left me with 10 fingers and no blood spilled…
Great choice on both machines! They will serve you well!
Wood Magazine produced a “Layout sheet”, just a 1/4" grid, and graphics of some basic shop machines to use as “cut out and paste” items to actually BUILD your shop.
I used their freely given graphics and digitized them, along with a grid sheet. To use it one has to open the sheet first then from the side pull machine graphics onto the grid sheet. Using “handles” on the graphics you can turn these in any rotation you want.
IF any one is interested I can eMail them the Zipped Folder, with Instructions. I won’t upload here because the folder is over 9 Mb.
IF wanted, contact me via eMail.
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Allright, this topic was so helpful (to me) that I thought I would ask another tool-related question to you folks.
It’s still unrelated to CNC, and very related to the fact I am remodeling right now.
So here goes: is there such a thing as a decent wall scanner? I have been drilling a bunch of holes in plaster and concrete walls, and so far I have been using common sense and a cheap-o detector that does work when I bring it near a live wire, but also seems to have false positives, as in suddenly beeping over a large area of a wall behind which there is clearly no live wire nor pipe/metal. It could be that the wall has a thin metal foil backing or something, but the false positives are not consistent. And there is nothing worse that getting a loud beep when inserting the tip of the detector in a half-drilled hole in concrete, after the area was tested clear initially.
My initial though was to go Bosch Blue,
I don’t mind spending up to a couple hundred bucks for something that would be reliable (considering the consequences of drilling in the wrong place), but I don’t want to end up with a very expensive gadget that is only marginally better than the $20 models out there. I suspect I also need to learn how to properly use those detectors for consistent results.
Thoughts/feedback ?
I feel your pain … My house has plaster and Lathe so I did buy the best I could find at a local store.
Short answer, Nearly anything that causes a varying reading will be read as a found stud.
My fix for it is to place 2 inch wide masking tape on the wall at varying levels and scan each strip of tape and mark where you get readings. Eventually a pattern will emerge.
the one I chose,
I doubt the link will do much good for you except for reading, so,
https://www.lowes.com/pd/Zircon-1-5-in-Scan-Depth-Metal-and-Wood-Stud-Finder/50320051
If all else fails, poke a hole in the wall and insert a bent piece of wire, rotate the wire until you find a stub and mark the spot…
Happy Hunting and watch out for wires…and plumbing…maybe do the Uncle Fester Light bulb trick?
In your experience, did that stud finder allow you to detect those to some acceptable level of accuracy?
Unfortunately my usecase is not finding where studs are (which is somewhat easier since as you mentioned, a regular pattern should emerge eventually), but rather to detect the presence of a wire/plumbing pipe hiding behind plaster, or a steel bar in reinforced concrete.
It was hit or miss on plumbing. It did fairly well around live wires, but I already had knowledge of approx where things were to avoid issues. It did find studs fairly accurately, again, through plaster and lathe.
Rebar in concrete, I have no idea.
I find these frustratingly inaccurate. I have a cheapo Stanley one and I can’t ever get it to give me a reading that makes sense. I know how the walls are constructed and that there should be a stud every Xmm, but it never works.
nb: out of interest (probably just my own), the phrase “a couple X” is an idiomatic US usage of “a couple of X”… since it is equivalent to “a pair” it actually needs an “of” before the noun.
Here’s an idea for you on the rebar…
Take a decent neodymium magnet and tape it to a 3 foot long piece of string… That should get you an indication.
The responses so far are quite interesting because that is exactly the early vibes I was getting from a little browsing (that one should probably lower their expectations for the effectiveness of those devices). Some of the higher end models make (suspicious?) claims about using “radar” technology, but I have not looked into that yet.
For our friends across the pond… this expression is thought to come from toy Meccano construction sets which were originally offered in “Box Standard” and “Box Deluxe”… the English being what they (we) are decided “Bog Standard” and “Dogs Bollocks” were much more interesting ways to say these words. Which, let’s face it, is true 
(this etymology is probably wrong… but it is a nice story and totally believable)
Enough there to build a Shapeoko 0.1 
I also have lath and plaster. Recently i have been thinking about an endoscope for getting a good look behind some walls that i know have lots of plumbing. Much of it is plastic that was pulled between floors. So before i try to attach something the wall, i kinda want to know whats back there…
I definitely thought of that too, especially since I have a variety of USB endoscopes left from my “dust shoe cam” experiments. There needs to be an initial entry point though, and then enough space to move the endoscope.
This higher end Bosch wall scanner says it has an “Ultra-wide band radar”:
and the datasheet does seem to show it’s not just a marketing term:
so it’s a dual technology scanner (inductive sensor like every other stud finder, plus the radar sensor)
But whether it performs significantly better than the “meh” products, and is worth its $600+ price tag, is another question altogether.
I wish, but I don’t, and I would probably not trust them anyway (not after 5 different owners have lived here, remodeled, made extensions, etc…) 
