The MagSwitch and the Tablesaw

You know you are onto a good tool, when once you have it, you find that you can’t live without it! The next part of setting up the tablesaw was adding the cast iron wings. A friend of mine was very adamant that this is a two person job, and given the weight of the wings I would definitely agree with him.

However……I needed the wings on, and didn’t have a spare set of hands available, and the cast iron wings are HEAVY. The solution came very easily – what if I used the magnetic strength of the MagSquare (500lb of force) to help hold the top while I did up the bolts?

So that is what I tried, and it worked superbly.

I got the MagSquare overhanging the edge of the table, turned it on, then carefully lifted the wing into position. The MagSquare gripped the wing, and it was so strong I was able to completely ignore that end of the table and could concentrate on threading the bolt through at the other end.

***Update*** A suggestion from MagSwitch after reading this post was to turn the magnet 90 degrees to how you see it here – I chose this orientation thinking it would give maximum grip, but apparently the other orientation would have been even better, with the added benefit of the machined flat bottom of the MagSquare also helping to align the two surfaces.***

I still had to hold the outside edge of the table, and the magnet couldn’t resist the ‘bending moment’ (to use a term from my engineering past (hope I used it in the right context!!)) ie – the magnet supported the weight perfectly, but the outside edge of the table could drop away if I let it. If I had 2 MagSquares coupled together to form a bridge it would have been even better! However, the one was more than enough for the task.

There was only one drawback – the magnet is so strong when switched on, that when I was trying to thread the bolt into the hole directly under the magnet, it would keep pulling the bolt out of my hand! (And later, it would keep snatching the spanner away from me – no better than a 2 year old!)

Here it is completely holding the front edge of the cast iron wing, with only a single bolt in the rear of the table so I could take the photo. Cool huh!