R.I.P Tablesaw...

My most trusted friend and confidant in the shop died earlier this week.  My little cheapo 10+ year old Delta contractor style tablesaw finally broke down on me.  I bought this saw in June of 2012 for $200 used off Craigslist.  It was in good shape, and it has served me well for a little less than a year.  I have passed many a board-foot of lumber through that saw and constructed nearly everything in my shop excluding my workbenches with it.

I was using it on Monday to crosscut a piece of recycled deck board that was slightly warped.  It caused the saw to bind just a bit, which has happened a hundred times before this. It didn't even bind enough to stall the motor.  But the blade just disappeared midcut.  The motor was still running, but the blade was nowhere to be seen.  I stopped the saw and took off the blade insert and saw the arbor and motor assembly down in the body of the saw as if it were fully lowered.  I tried adjusting the height crank to no avail.  After taking the table off the body to investigate, I found a terminal wound.

These pictures show the moving assembly of the saw.  I only found out as part of this post mortem that this model only has a single trunion.  This is somewhat of a design flaw in my opinion, as it puts all the strain on the one attachment point.  The next two shots show what went wrong.

The piece that broke is a bracket that connects the rod for raising and lowering the blade to the arbor assembly.  This is a cast piece, made out of pretty thin material.  Honestly I'm surprised it lasted this long!  This is just classic cheaping out on the part of the manufacturer.  Here are a couple more shots of the carnage.

  

Now I'm all for repairing things.  I fully expected to try to repair this until I figured out just what had gone wrong.  These little pieces would have to be welded back together in order to be repaired.  I don't have any welding equipment, but I'm sure I could find someone to weld it.  But the broken area straddles the pivot point where the arbor assembly pivots on a rod to raise and lower the blade.  Any attempt to weld in that area would quite likely lead to messing up the very tight tolerance on this pivot point.  Not to mention that it seems like any repair here would be a weak point likely to break again.  So I'm sorry to say that I'll be taking the typical American route here: buy another one.  So if you know anyone in central Arkansas that wants to sell a tablesaw nicer than this one, drop me a line.  I still haven't decided if I'll buy another used one or go for a new one, but it'll have to be an overall higher quality saw than this one.