I bought the Excalibur a month
or so after I bought the Unisaw in February. At $389 it's fairly
expensive. However, there were enough people on the woodworking
boards who had lost fingers, parts of fingers, or partial use of their
hands that I decided to buy some safety equipment before I needed
it.
Installing the guard was a far greater effort than I expected it to
be. It took me about 30 hours to get everything together. A
lot of that time was spent shopping for parts.
The first issue I ran into was the fact that it's designed for a
thicker extension table. (I haven't tried it but it's my
understanding that the biesemeyer extension table will work without modification.)
Because the holes in the right angle metal didn't line up with a
3/4" table I have to buy a piece of 1" square aluminum at Home
Depot, drill some holes in it, and bolt that to the extension
table. Viola! Now I have a thicker table.
The next issue was keeping the saw mobile. The normal way to
install the guard has a support leg reaching all the way to the
ground. To get around this I measured the width of the mobile base
frame and attached the angle iron to the wooden platform. Next, I
slid the platform's angle iron over the mobile base frame, drilled a few
holes and bolted it in place.
When that was done I attached the main arm to the vertical portion of
the unit and put the support leg in place. With the leg where I
needed it to be I secured it in place with small wooded strips.
The support leg is supposed to be mounted to the underside of the
table with two metal bars that they provide. You can see them here.
However, because of the shelf that came with my Unisaw the arms could
not be installed. The good news is that with the mobile platform's
wooden strips holding it in place I don't need them.
In usage, it works very well. The dust collection is nearly
flawless. I ran 6" pipe which happens to have almost exactly twice
the flow of a 4" pipe. Knowing that, I have a 6x4x4 reducing Y and
I run 4" hose to the guard and another 4" hose to the Unisaw.
While I still list sliding it out of the way in my "bad" column I've
developed a bit more skill at it. I can usually slide it right
where I want it the first time. When making very narrow rips you
would need to slide it off center so that they fence can get closer to
the blade. You need to slide it totally out of the way when
cutting box joints, etc.
Raising and lowering it is a pleasure. I have it set to provide
a good amount of resistance so that it stays in place even if the wood
tried to lift. However, I still find raising and lowering it to be
an easy task. In short, the tension can be nicely "dialed in".
