I recently bought some thumb screws and new set / anvil screws for my blade clamps for my old Hawk from McMaster. When browsing the website I seen they have flat end set screws and also seen they have them that have a swivel end similar to the swivel on the Excalibur/DeWalt. If they had them in the thumb screw I’d have tried them but figured probably useless in the set screw side.
Anyway the flat bottom set screw the flat portion has a smaller surface than just a plain set screw. Probably would work well with larger blades but I had trouble with my #3 blades so just a heads up don’t try them if you run upon them as they probably won’t work.
Now the thumb screws, every time I order these or get them from a hardware store the center in kind of concaved and they don’t work either unless I screw them into a board and dress the ends flat. If you’re not careful about dressing the ends you can get them on a angle and pretty much deem the new one useless . Which kind of puts you back to where you was and why you got new screws in the first place. I’m wondering if anyone had purchased them outside of the saw manufacturer and how / where do you find them machined with a flat surface to start with.
I normally have decent success with drilling a appropriate sized hole in a scrap wood piece and screwing in (straight) the screws and sanding them. But even this sometimes for some reason not always presents me with a true square flat surface. I’m wondering about maybe the board warping or using the same one over time may make the board itself becoming unflattend. I have thought about threading a piece of flat stock steel to use which may be more stable?
Anyway just a heads up on those flat set screws. Oh they do have smaller and larger flat end ones and yes I did order the larger ones. Possible they sent the wrong ones? I don’t know. I’m just not going to try them again. They would take a lot of sanding / grinding to get them down to the larger portion of the screw so dressing them wouldn’t work too well.