By the Staff of Scroll Saw Woodworking & Crafts
Like the Excalibur saws, Jet’s scroll saw uses a link drive system and has a tilting saw arm (insets of a tilting table). But it has a few special features.
Jet’s major innovation is a quick-change blade holding and tensioning system. The saw has a removable bottom holder that you remove to insert a blade using a fixture built into the saw. Then you replace the holder, sliding the vertical blade through a slot in the table. The magic happens at the top: the blade fits into an opening with an attached lever that automatically grips and tensions the blade when engaged—no thumb screws or fiddling with a tension knob. In theory, you can prepare a number of blades and holders in advance and then change them quickly as needed while sawing. In practice, we found it very difficult to place the blade in the bottom holder correctly and to get the top holder to grip thin blades, such as the #2/0 blades we used to cut thin plywood. It’s possible to adjust the setscrew in the top chuck to grip small blades, but that makes it difficult to use large blades. The system also makes it impossible to top-feed blades.
To accommodate the blade holding system, Jet moved the blade closer to the front of the saw table. Although the table is similar in size to those of other saws in our workshop, the Jet’s blade is about 4″ (10.2cm) from the front of the table, as opposed to the 8″ (20.3cm) of other saws. This thinner strip of table provides less support for large projects, requiring us to press harder on the blank to keep it flat on the table or risk angled cuts.
Overall, we enjoyed using the Jet. It cuts smoothly and with a minimum of vibration, and its power and speed were sufficient for all of our tests. Our quibbles were few—one user didn’t care for the slot in the table, and another didn’t like the foot pedal. However, scrollers who use a wide range of blade sizes, top feed, or cut thick wood should test the saw thoroughly to make sure it meets their needs before investing.
The MSRP for the Jet JWSS-22b is $1,080. Visit JetTools.com to find a retailer.
