The Bolt Sears Told You To Ignore | Field Report
The Bolt Sears Told You To Ignore Is Why Your Father's Table Saw Does Not Cut Straight Anymore.
July 2026 · 8 min read
My father's 1976 Craftsman, bought new at Sears. The saw still had square cuts in it. The problem was one bolt I was never meant to reach.
There is one bolt inside your old Craftsman table saw that the owner's manual tells you to work around. It holds the front of the trunnion, the cast iron cradle that keeps your blade lined up square with the miter slot. The day your saw starts burning cuts and pinching boards, and every old contractor saw gets there eventually, that bolt stands between you and a fix that costs nothing.
I am not a machinist and I am not selling anything. I taught mechanical drawing at a high school here in Dayton for thirty one years, and I have built my own furniture since before my kids could walk. The saw in my garage is a 1976 Craftsman 113 my father bought new at Sears, and I inherited it with his pencil marks still on the fence.
I am writing this because I nearly sold that saw last spring, because the fault turned out to be a free forty minute adjustment, and because the only thing standing in the way was one three eighths hex bolt I could touch with two fingers and could not turn. A man named Chet, who made foundry patterns for thirty five years, put the answer in my hand at our woodworking club. Most owners never hear about it. So here it is.
The bolt your own manual tells you to skip
Look up inside the open base of a 113 and you will find the trunnion bolts, the four fasteners that clamp the blade's whole cradle to the underside of the cast iron top. To square the blade with the miter slot you loosen them, shift the trunnion a few hundredths, and snug them back. The heads point straight down at you, and a socket drops onto every one of them sweet as you please. On three of them you can also swing a wrench. The front one sits in the pocket behind the apron, and the apron takes exactly the space where the handle has to travel. You can reach in and touch it with two fingers. That is as far as most men get.
Here is the part I did not believe until I had the manual open on the fence rail. Sears knew. The alignment section tells you to loosen the accessible trunnion bolts. Accessible. That is the word they printed. The men who drew this saw bolted the trunnion on while the top lay upside down on a bench at the factory, the easiest four bolts in the building that day, then set it on the base and shipped it with instructions that quietly write one bolt out of the job. The forums have spent forty years on workarounds. The standard advice, posted year after year by patient men, is to unbolt the entire cast iron top and flip it upside down on sawhorses. Men have drilled access holes through the cabinet wall. Men keep shorter bolts in a drawer for the day they give up. A fellow at our club has the later six bolt model and reports it straight faced: he has to deal with all six.
Everything on my pegboard had a go. Here is how each one did.
- A combination wrench from below. There is room to hang it on the head. There is no room to move it. One flat of turn, sometimes less, before the handle met the apron. At that rate one bolt is an afternoon, and it still has to go back tight.
- A stubby ratchet. The head cleared, barely, and then the handle had nowhere to swing. Two clicks, reset, two clicks, with my whole arm dead overhead inside a steel box.
- A universal joint on a long extension, snaked in from the back. It folded at the angle, cocked the socket sideways, and started rounding the corners off a bolt head that has sat in that saw since 1976.
- The manual's way. Loosen the three you can reach, leave the front one snug, tap the trunnion over. The blade moved, and the moment I torqued everything back down it walked right back where it had been. One clamped corner is all it takes.
- The forum way. I actually started unbolting the top to flip it. Got two rail bolts out before I did the honest math on my back, my sixty six years, and a slab of cast iron that weighs more than I do. Carol found me on the shop stool pricing new saws I did not want.
What that one bolt actually costs a man
Put the real cost on the table, the honest way. That bolt is not seized. It needs no penetrant, no heat, no new part. What it costs you is everything downstream of it. A blade that does not run parallel to the miter slot pinches the work between blade and fence on the way through the cut. That is where the burn marks on my cherry came from, and it is where kickback comes from. Not carelessness. Geometry. One afternoon last spring the saw threw a foot long offcut past my ear hard enough to mark the drywall behind me. I unplugged it and stayed out of the garage for two weeks. My grandson stopped asking to help. That was the part that actually stung.
Now the arithmetic. The alignment that cures all of it is free. It costs forty minutes and four bolts. Not knowing that, I spent the better part of two hundred dollars chasing the symptom: a sixty dollar blade, a link belt, machined pulleys, feather boards. The fellows at the club tell of men who gave up and paid fifteen hundred dollars and up for a new saw to escape a fault a free adjustment cures. And no shop will touch a fifty year old Craftsman anyway. On the open market my saw is worth maybe a hundred and fifty dollars. Except it was my father's, so it is not.
There is room to seat a socket. There is no room to swing anything behind it. That corner is the whole story.
Then a man at the wood club put a bar in my hand
Chet is seventy four. He spent thirty five years as a pattern maker in a foundry shop, working wood to half a thousandth for men who poured iron against it, and he still runs the same model saw he bought with an early paycheck. I told my story at the club meeting, the bolt, the manual, the mark on the drywall, expecting sympathy. He laughed once, the way a man laughs at a story he has heard fifty times, and went out to his truck.
He came back with something I had never laid eyes on. A flat black steel bar, about fourteen inches, a square drive at each end, a fixed offset set into the body. Not a flex joint. Not a wobble. He had me press my thumb into the drive end. Something gave, very slightly, inside the steel. A roller chain, sealed the length of the bar. "The chain takes the bend. The socket doesn't," he said. "You slide it in flat behind the apron where there is room, the chain carries your pull around the corner, and the socket sits dead square on that bolt while your ratchet swings out in the open cabinet. Half the crooked saws in this club got trued up with this bar. That bolt was never tight. It was never rusted. There was just no room to swing anything on it. Stay square. That was my rule for thirty five years, and this bar is why my saw still keeps it."
"The chain takes the bend. The socket doesn't."
A slim, dead straight bar that slides flat into the pocket behind the saw's apron where nothing else fits. The sealed roller chain inside carries your pull around the offset and lands it square on the fastener, with your ratchet out in the open cabinet where your hand has room. It is called the Savary offset wrench.
The sealed chain is the trick
A roller chain inside the steel body carries torque round the offset, so it never folds like a flex-head or walks like a universal joint.
It moves the ratchet out of the box
A bar 0.63 inches thin slips flat past the apron and the cabinet wall, and your ratchet swings in the open where your arm has room.
Takes your own sockets and bits
Square drive at both ends fits the sockets already in your box. Holds real torque, up to seventy newton meters, a hair past fifty foot pounds. A trunnion bolt asks for a fraction of that.
It reaches. It is honest.
This solves access to a fastener that turns fine but you cannot get a tool on. It is the right shape for a boxed-in trunnion, not a fix for stripped threads, worn arbor bearings, or a fence that will not lock.
It only comes from one place
You will not find it at the hardware store and you will not find it in the tool aisle. The maker sells direct from their own site only. Eighty nine dollars, shipped free to your door. Set that against a fifteen hundred dollar new saw, or against selling your father's iron for scrap money, and it is not much of a decision.
What happened next
Other owners who stopped losing to one bolt
"Six years of burn marks because of one bolt behind the apron. When I finally found the line in the manual about the accessible bolts I read it to my wife out loud. Trued the saw up in about an hour with this bar and the burn marks are gone."
"Different badge, same trap. The front trunnion hardware on my Delta hides behind the stiffener rail. The bar reached it without pulling the top off. My miter slot and my blade finally agree with each other."
"Mine is the six bolt model and I had managed five. The last one is the reason I bought this. Since then it has done my jointer fence hardware and the motor mount bolts too. Should have existed forty years ago."
Chet, thirty five years a pattern maker. He is the one who put the bar in my hand and told me the bolt was never the problem.
True it up before the next project
If there is an old contractor saw in your garage, yours or your father's, the trunnion under it has not moved since the day it left the line, and the fix everyone swears is impossible is a forty minute job with the right reach. You can keep feeding it blades and belts, you can price a new saw you do not want, or you can true it up in your own shop for nothing, because the one bolt they told you to ignore is not a problem anymore.
Home Shop Field Notes is a reader-supported publication. This is a first-person account from a private owner and reflects his personal experience with his own saw and his own manual; bolt counts, hardware, and procedures vary by model and year. The Savary offset extension wrench is a hand tool designed to reach fasteners in tight, blind locations. It improves access; it is not represented as a remedy for corroded or damaged hardware, worn arbor bearings, or damaged trunnion castings, nor as a substitute for the proper alignment procedure for your machine. Always unplug the saw before reaching inside the base, follow the service documentation for your model, and use guards and push devices when cutting. Results vary by machine and condition. Craftsman and Delta are trademarks of their respective owners. This publication is not affiliated with Sears, Craftsman, or Delta.
