[torontotool]

I can fill you in a little on the Pro-Cut 50 since I use one most every day. By design it will cross-cut any board or panel up to 50" wide with excellent accuracy. Because you can cross cut your large panels first, you don't always need the 18 or 20 running feet you would need for a table saw.

It also works just like a table saw for rip-cutting. It comes with a 50" Aux Side Fence that works like a huge feather board to hold your work piece tight against the fence for smooth and very accurate rip cuts.

It also comes with everything you need to add your router. With the router you can do a wide variety of functions and, the really nice part is, the router is top mounted so you can always see what the router is doing. The machine is designed with clamping rails on both sides that gives you even more flexibility for cutting or routing.

You can make countless jigs because the saw or router moves through the wood in the cross-cut position. You can even use it as a huge miter saw or cut arcs in panels. You also have the ability to kerf cut or pre score the wood prior to cutting to achieve a factory edge even on thin veneer sheets.

The Pro-Cut 50 is a very popular machine and there is generally a waiting list to get a system. At last count is was 4 to 6 weeks. The video link is

and the web site is www.torontotool.com. There is a section for customer projects that are quite impressive.

 

[torontotool]

As luck would have it, there is now a dust collection system available for the Pro-Cut 50 as a simple add on. There is a removable overhead arm that attaches to the machine with simple thumb screws to hold the 2-1/2" hose with adaptors for either a shop-vac or the standard 4" shop system. I have not see any dust control that is 100%. The Pro-Cut 50 is about 90% for dust collection with the saw. (not bad) For the router there are numerous attachments for dust collection but again, I don't think any are 100%.

There will be a video produced shortly about the dust collection. It will show saw dust without dust collection compared to with dust collection.

I read a post about the router bit burning the wood. Because the router is mounted overhead on the Pro-Cut 50 (much like a CNC machine), once a cut is made I have not experienced burning when locking the sled for x and y movement. This is provided you use good bits that are not dull of course.

Like most, I have experienced the burning when stopping too long using a hand held router especially with larger dado bits. Here is a simple trick I use to help avoid that with my hand held router. The reason the bit burns the wood is because it is flat on the wood and the weight of the router resting on the wood does not allow any air flow around the bit. What I do is shim the router base so the base is about 1 to 5 thousands higher on the trailing edge. This is just enough air gap to allow the bit to "breath" but not enough to affect the cut. I may even argue that I get a better cut because of the slight angle of attack. With this simple shim trick, you will see that you have more time before the bit burns the wood. Again, you need to use good bits that are sharp.

Roger