This little saw came to me through an Ebay auction from a fairly local seller. It features a sliding table and was apparently used by printers to cut lead slugs, which required a fair degree of accuracy, at least compared to normal table saws. The table slides on inverted V-ways and the saw originally took blades of around 5" diameter. I'm hoping to use it to cut out small pieces of plastic, like acrylic, Delrin, PVC, etc. from larger stock with enough precision to avoid excessive work in the milling machine. Thjis type of saw is no longer made and they are apparently sought after by wood workers for fine work. There were several other manufacturers of this type of saw and the Hammond Trim-O-Saw seems to have been the most common.
I've been able to find almost no info on this saw on the web, so if anyone is familiar with them, I sure would like to get any info that may be available. The patent numbers date from the 1930's but the diagrams in those patents seem to be from a different version of the saw. I'm assuming that this one dates from the 1940's or 1950's. Thanks to the historian on the OWWM web site, I've discovered some additional ways to search for later patents. OWWM can be found here:
It's a terrific site for research old woodworking machines and highly recommended.
Here's general view of the saw. The footprint of the base is about 18" x 31" and the saw weighs around 200 pounds. The table is 16" x 20" and the sliding portion is 10" wide. The saw guard shown here is not original to the saw and may have been intended for another machine as it sure doesn't seem to fit this one. The original saw guard pivoted from the back of the saw but all that's left there now is a small part of the CI elbow where the guard broke off.
The name plate on the saw - it's a Model MC Saw Trimmer, S/N 703 and made or sold by American Type Founders in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The company seems to be out of business now.
This is a shot of the table with the sliding portion moved back. It has inverted V-ways which seem to be in pretty good shape - no scoring, obvious signes of wear or corrosion.
A couple of dowel pins in the bottom of the fence are used to align the fence perpendicular to the plane of the blade by locating the pins in holes bored into the front edge of the sliding portion of the table. There's supposed to be a square that mounts to the fence to keep work square to the blade but that part is missing from this saw.
The seller has another version of this saw and this is the fence and square on his saw. The square has a sort of half nut that mates on the lead screw contained with in the fence body. The push button retracts the single half nut away from the threaded rod so that the square can be rapidly slide along the fence to adjust width of cut.
A bottom view of the fence and square from the sellers other fence.
A close up of the fine adjustment dial on the fence. It seems to be calibrated in printer's points, which I believe is 1/72" of an inch. The dial has detents for half points giving a resolution of 1/144" or about 0.007". The fence itself is marked off in printer's picas, with 12 points per pica - hence each pica is equal to 0.167".
A close up of the arbor with a saw blade mounted and another on the table.
The saw blade is mounted on a flange that threads onto the end of the arbor. The knurled disk threads onto the arbor between the blade and the pulley and is apparently used to adjust the distance from the blade to the table slot and to lock the flange onto the arbor.
One of the arbor support "ears" was snapped off and this will need to be repaired. No surprise there as the seller had described this problem in his listing
As seen here the casting break was clean and probably very recent as there is no sign of rust on the fracture.
The arbor support, removed from the saw. The large shaft is the pivot for the arbor casting and the smaller shaft is the pivot for the arbor cover, which swings up from the table to allow access to the blade. These parts were taken to a local blacksmith shop and the owner seemed to think that it would be a simple repair. Less than 3 hours later he called to let me know that it was done. The casting will be picked up later this week, hopefully in serviceable condition.
As can be seen above there is quite a bit of work to do on the saw. It needs a general clean up and removal of rust will require a fair amount of time. The rust actually looks quite a bit better up close than would be expected from the pictures. The only significant pitting is on portions of the fence, but that shouldn't be bad enough to affect operation. Hopefully a bit of time with some kerosene, steel wool and fine abrasive pads will take care of that. The paint seems to be in generally good condition and I'll probably leave that alone. The broken arbor support casting has hopefully been repaired satisfactorily; if not a new one will have to be made from bar stock. The square will be a challenge from both design and fabrication standpoints. Hopefully the leadscrew in the fence is a standard type. I should probably do something about the blade guard - maybe by rigging up a guard from a standard table saw. Making a new square will be the biggest challenge. The design made sense when I looked at the seller's good example, but the details are already hazy in my mind just a week later. I'll probably end up driving over to him at some point to make some detailed measurements.
April 29, 2005
Just picked up the repaired arbor support and it looks like they did a pretty good job.
Both the arbor and cover pivot shafts are good fits so it looks like the blacksmith shop did a good job of aligning the broken ear to the rest of the casting and they cleaned up the repair to make the weld flush to the outside of the casting.
There's still a bead on the inside corner but that should be fairly easy to clean up if its even necessary.
Last edited: 10/29/2005