New Table Saw (video)

Background

jay-helpIn Janurary 2014, I noticed that Jay’s website started having issues with either database errors or the page simply not responding. I took to Google+ and found this message. After literally hundreds of emails, Jay and I worked together to get his website stable. I wasn’t looking for anything and honestly I felt I “owed” it to him since I had learned a great bit from his videos and also sold many of his Jay’s 2×4 outdoor park benches on Craigslist.

Roadtrip!

A few weeks ago, my wife and I made the 1250 mile journey from Ironton, Ohio to Starkville, Mississippi to pickup a new-to-me table saw from Jay Bates.

I used a dash-mounted GoPro Hero 3+ Black edition shooting at 7MP time lapse, 1 shot per second. The entire trip took two memory cards for an overall total of 77GB/37,000 files. The video posted above was only slightly edited and contains 99% of the footage, even when I took a wrong turn in Corinth and my miserable failures of trying to back the U-Haul trailer into Jay’s driveway. Those photos were resized using a Photoshop action that cropped the 7MP photos down to 1280×720 reducing file size to a total of 5GB. The timelapse video was made in Premiere using the “Numbered Stills” function which puts one photo per frame in the sequence. This turned the 37,000 files into a total of 1233 frames (@ 30 fps) for a total of 20 minutes 31 seconds and with 400% speed, it shrinks the video to about 5 minutes.

All of this turns into the equivalent average land speed of 1814MPH. Sounds pretty fast? The Space Shuttle has to reach 17,500MPH to enter the Earth’s orbit and the famed Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird” had an optimal cruising speed of Mach 3.2 (2,434 MPH). Until I saw these numbers, it didn’t put into perspective of just how damn fast those two machines were.

Sadly to say, the return trip took two hours “longer” since I was pulling the U-Haul trailer with the saw and losing an hour coming back into the Eastern time zone. Gas mileage on my truck dropped by 25% versus the trip down even though we avoided the mountainous terrain of eastern Kentucky/Tennessee.

I’ve never rented a trailer from U-Haul and I specifically mention it here because I was very impressed with how well it handled highway speeds. The tires were still relative new (had the “knobbies” still attached to the sidewalls) and it had very little effect on my truck even at 75MPH. Total fees for the one-way rental were about $180 including the optional insurance coverage.

For those who support online woodworkers, Thank You.