Use bevel blade for tablesaw tuneup

After months of saving (and pleading), I finally got my new tablesaw. But late in the assembly process, I accidentally knocked the blade out of parallel with the miter slot. I started digging through drawers, trying to jury-rig some kind of alignment tool, when I stumbled upon my sliding bevel gauge. It was then that the solution hit me.

I took the blade out of the bevel gauge and the washer off the bottom of the saw's miter-gauge bar, and mounted the blade to the bar, as shown in the drawing above. I raised the tablesaw blade fully and set the bevel-gauge blade so that its point was touching one saw tooth near the back of the slot. Then I rotated the saw blade by hand so that the same tooth was near the front of the slot. By sliding the bar/bevel blade assembly forward to that tooth, I quickly saw how much I needed to adjust the blade to make it parallel. The process is easy, accurate, and, best of all, didn't cost me a penny!
—Ray Vojtash, North Plainfield, N.J.