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The all-LEGO version barely cuts paper. (Credit: Jamie’s Brick Jams, YouTube)
Although building a table saw out of LEGO is probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you look at those colorful bits of plastic, [Jamie] has been on a bit of a search for more applications of his LEGO-based air-powered motors. Naturally this led to the idea of doing something useful with it, like making a table saw you can actually use for real wood.
Starting off with a basic prototype using only regular LEGO pieces to get the mechanism figured out, [Jamie] then builds this up into said air-powered table saw featuring an actual metal blade. Suffice it to say that this isn’t something that you want your children to do with their LEGO while unsupervised.
The star of the show is of course the air-powered turbine that spins the blade. This is something that [Jamie] has been working on for a while, going through a number of prototypes to figure out a 3D printed geometry for the turbine blade that helps to convert as much of the high-pressure air into rotation.
Along the way it was also discovered that 3D printing saw blades is pretty hard, probably due to the lack of a sharp edge. This is definitely an area where it’s hard to beat a real table saw blade, with the added caveat that anything that’s good at cutting up boards of wood and sausages will just as happy slice through careless primate fingers.
In terms of safety features, the air supply is cut automatically with a sort of dead-man switch that requires you to keep one hand on it while using the final table saw design. There also an auto-feeding system added that tries to guide the board into the saw, but this turned out to be finicky. Suffice it to say that an air compressor and a handful of non-LEGO-approved components created a pretty convincing table saw.
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