Since my new shop is in the basement, dust collection is a bit more important than when I had my own building and could do as I pleased in the shop. With that in mind, I upgraded the dust collection on my table saw. I purchased the Grizzly Overarm Blade Guard to use with the saw.

First impressions were that this is an extremely solid and well built unit. It's made mostly of steel and connects to a 4" DC hose. There were a number of issues getting it set up and installed, and a few more once I started using it.

Assembly was easy and took about 20 minutes total. It basically involved attaching the legs, dropping the arm into the pivot, and assembling and attaching the blade guard.

Once I slid it into place, the problems started. All of these are because of my specific setup and I was able to work around them.

• I have 8' rails on my saw and a large table to the left. The arm didn't extend quite as far as the specs said it would so I had to cut a couple of inches off the far end of the table.
• Because my saw doesn't have a cabinet, there was no place to connect the bottom leg to the saw for stability. I made an extension to attach it to the base of the saw.
• My saw has an Incra TS/LS positioner so I had to set the post to either the infeed or outfeed side of the blade rather than centered on the blade
• Because the blade guard is so large, that meant it either hung at the very edge off the back of the table or was very far forward in front of the blade.

I worked around all of those issues and got it set up. and connected a 4" anti static hose to it connected to my dust collection system. When I started using it, more issues arose.

• The guard doesn't move smoothly up and down over stock as it is fed in. It would hang up on the font edge, deflect toward the back of the saw and then and then snap up and over the workpiece.
• The entire assembly would move and leave the blade guard in a different position after every cut.
• The guard itself is really wide, nearly 5", so it was completely in the way and didn't leave enough room for a push stick between the fence and the guard ripping 3" nail strips for cabinets. I wouldn't have been able to get the fence close enough to the blade to rip face frame parts.
• The one shining spot on this was that the dust collection was nearly perfect. above the table.
• One thing that is noted in the manual is that this guard is only that. It doesn't provide a splitter, riving knife, or anti kickback of any kind.

I solved the problem of it moving by securing the post of the blade guard to the end of the table with a 3" x7" square ubolt through a 2x4 secured to the table as shown below.



After using and fiddling with it for a few weeks, I removed the blade guard and went back to my trusty Shark Guard. I did order a new 3" dust port for the Shark Guard. SInce I'm using a larger port on the Shark Guard and it now goes to a 3" pipe that's straight vs the 2" pipe with a few u-turns in it, dust collection above the table is much better than it was.

Overall, it turned out to be a really expensive way to hold up a pipe and a hose to my Shark Guard.