BT3 Angel of Shim Death....

[eccentrictinkerer]

After only 3 months of work with my new (to me) 21829, the Angel of Shim Death has visited my shop. I have never enjoyed a new tool as much as I've enjoyed this saw.

After feeling a little more effort needed to raise the blade, I took the covers off and there the shim was all sproinged out. I had hoped that the 21829 was somewhat immune to this problem.

I've searched and found a lot of articles on the shim problem and found mostly BT3000 fixes. How should I search to find 21829 fixes?

Your help will be profoundly appreciated.

[LCHIEN]

i've been a close reader of this forum.
I've not heard of a BT3100 with shim problems. I assume since the 21829 came out after the BT3100 that they would share the shim design.

Despite the improved retention mechanism, you still have to keep the saw clean and lubricate the elevation tracks they ride in.

P.S. for lube, I just lower the blade, massage some Johnson's paste was onto the tracks, then raise the blade mechanism and do the same on the bottom half.

[Stytooner]

I suspect they have the same shim design as the 3100, but that isn't evidence. I don't recall it happening to one of these, but guess it is possible. Loring is correct about the cleaning and the lube. Not as much cleaning as keeping lube on it though. There are many different types of lube that work very well.
I have tried many. I forget the name of the stuff I use now. It is a household spray lube that dries quickly. Some kind of Teflon coating.

I would order the shims from Sears and just follow some of the instructions on this site. I don't foresee any troubles for you even if they do happen to be a little different. If they are different, a couple photo's would be a thing to add to this knowledge base.
Good luck with it.

[Garasaki]

Don't be too scared of the shim replacement process.

You'll need to set aside about 2 hours of uninterrupted time, but it isn't particularly difficult. There's a fair amount of head-scratching involved in disassembly, but as your figure out how everything goes together, reassembly is remarkably quick (if I were a service person, doing this on a daily or weekly basis, I bet I could cut the job down to being somewhere around a 20 minute job!). I found it an almost enjoyable process as I learned much about how the saw is built and how it works. You also get a chance to clean and lube a lot of areas while you are in there.

I know your saw is only 3 months old - mine was 11 years old when I did the operation, and the difference it made in ease of usablility was very signifigant.

[LinuxRandal]

Do you have the receipt? It should have a transaction and store number, that you could email Sears customer service and see if they would send you the replacement shims under the warranty.

[jonmnelson]

Do you have the receipt? It should have a transaction and store number, that you could email Sears customer service and see if they would send you the replacement shims under the warranty.

Yeah, this seems like a warranty item to me. My 21829 came with a one-year warranty and I bought the two-year extended warranty for about $14.00. While people seem to say shim replacement isn't that difficult a task, I'd be leery about opening up my relatively new saw to fix something that shouldn't have happened so soon. I hope this isn't common as my 21829 is just over two months old and I don't want to be doing this anytime soon.

Good luck.

[eccentrictinkerer]

Thanks for all the advice and encouragement. The 21829 is new to me, but not new. I found it in a pawn shop last summer. It was missing the SMT, but had a router acc'y table, miter slot add-on and a fence. There was virtually no wear or dust on the saw. They were asking $200, but I explained that without the SMT or a miter gauge it was less than half a saw.

The clerk talked the manager and offered for $65! The following day there was a BT3100 in the Minneapolis CL for $50. I hot-footed over to check it out. It had a good SMT, two fences, two router acc'y tables and a miter slot acc'y!

The owner said it was making a funny sound. He had ripped about 500' of redwood 2x8's. I figured it was probably the the arbor bearing from the sound of it.

I bought new plastic guides for the SMT and fence and some other parts from a local tool repair shop. So, for less than $150 I've got two saws and a BUNCH of extra stuff. I replaced the arbor bearing in the BT3100 and should have replaced the shims while I was at it.

Thanks again for all the help.

J.D.

[crokett]

My BT had the shim problem despite my best efforts to keep it clean. My fix was to upgrade to the BT3100 spring shims. If you want to do this I posted an article on the upgrade procedure.