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This is officially the craziest woodworking tool I've ever seen. German power tool manufacturer Mafell makes a track saw called the PSS 3100e. You say, big deal, Festool makes a track saw, Eurekazone makes one. But Mafell's is freaking automatic.
The PSS 3100e from MAFELL is the worlds first self-driven, rail-guided and mobile panel saw. In a single operation, the portable panel saw system handles cutting of lengths of up to 2800 mm (110 1/4 in.) and with the follow-on fence even longer cuts are possible.
"2800mm"—By the way guys, once we get into the thousands with the millimeters, can't we just switch over to meters? It's like saying your baby is 64 months old. Anyways check this crazy thing out:
Pretty sweet that it's got a scoring setting, so you don't have to manually raise and lower the blade each time. I do wonder about the safety of the thing: For example, let's say it's making a 2-meter (sorry, 2000mm) cut, and while it's just 3/4s of the way through, someone bumps into the still-attached waste side of the material behind the blade and closes the kerf. What happens, does the resultant binding and kickback cause the thing to shoot backwards, or does it just shut down?
Still, I love that it comes back to home base after each cut. And Mafell, like Festool, is preoccupied with dust collection: They claim the PS 3100e operates "virtually dust free" when hooked up to a vac, even if you're cutting plasterboard.
I'm scared to ask how much this thing costs, but it's probably moot for us Yanks; looks like Mafell's keeping it Euro-market-only.
Comments
The 2800mm thing really freaked me out when I moved to London and had to work with the metric system, but you soon see the logic in it. Your brain quickly gets used to it.
take 9'4" subtract 30" and then divide by 3 so you can evenly space two items.
now take 2800 subtract 700 and divide by 3
I think you can see which one is easier... It also means that you almost never have to deal with fractions or decimals.
Milimeters are the common unit for engineering plans and technical drawings and sheets in Europe. At least for machinery and metallic structures.
Centimeters or even meters are more common in architectural and civil works plans.
The reason is trying to avoid the uso of the decimal point (wich is not the same in all countries, it varies between , and .) as it could lead to errors and loss of information because of rounding numbers.
As an european mechanical ingenieer I feel milimeters is the correct unit to use in this case.
By the way, very nice web, love it!
I work in the softgoods industry and one of our less sophisticated blocking tables (we primarily use large, computerized Gerber spreaders for production) has a very similar configuration except it utilizes a fabric cutting wheel instead of saw blade. The cutter head zips across the table at a frightening speed and then returns back to home. Intersting to see this adapted to a woodworking application.
Millimeters all the way.
They're the aerospace standard, even on huge aircraft like the A380.