Page History: Origins of Two Bladed Table Saws

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Page Revision: 2008/04/11 15:13

quote: rbrt_brnstn I'd like to:

1. make a list of as many makers of these as I can,
2. date them as well as I can,
3. find any patents pertaining to the design.
   

The saw that got me started thinking about this is listed in the OWWM.com archives under Indiana Machine Works and shown in a March, 1889, magazine note. Here is its:



Here are the suggestions so far (many a good bit later than this saw):

• American
• Baker Brothers
• Colburn
• Crescent
• Famous
• Fay
• Fay & Egan
• Greenlee
• Hall & Brown
• Luther
• Oliver
• Tannewitz
• Yates-American
  

You'll note that the Indian Machine advertisement:

1. doesn't seem to make much of the dual arbor feature
2. doesn't claim it is new.
   

The saw seems to have two tables, with one a slider, non-tilting table or arbors, with a tilting rip fence

quote Jeff Joslin

I started to reply to this yesterday but it led me down a research rathole and I never finished it. There are a bunch of names that can be added to the above list; the part that slowed me down was verifying which double-arbor saws have side-by-side blades which have collinear blades and a single blade opening.

The latter type of saw was, so far as I know, invented by C. P. S. Wardwell. The history of Wardwell's saw is pretty complicated because it was briefly made by Wardwell himself, then by L. D. Fay, Rollstone Machine Works and James Goodrich & Co. Then Wardwell resumed production. Putnam Machine Co. made a version, and so did C. H. Cowdrey. There was a bit of a patent war going on, as various people made changes to Wardwell's design to avoid his patents. It would take some serious research to figure out who was licensing whose designs.

The original Wardwell patent was 16,814, granted in 1857. I should add some links to the later patents from that patent. In the meantime, you can follow the trail of patents from the Wardwell entry on owwm.com. Here's a picture of the Wardwell design as made by Rollstone: http://datamp.org/images/1185-4.jpg[/img

I just did a patent search for saws of this type, and Wardwell's patent does seem to be the first. The second such patent was to Salmon Putnam, assigned to Putnam Machine Co., for an improvement to Wardwell's patent. The third patent was to one Hiram Thompson, assigned to R. Ball & Co., for a saw similar in concept but different in design to Wardwell's.

Jeff J.