I was able to get my new blade tracking correctly, by paying a lot more attention to the initial setup for the idler wheel tilt mechanism.? My experience with this has shown that the shaft can be moved in and out quite a bit while still being able to (kinda, sorta) adjust the tracking, at least on the undriven wheel.? If the fixing screw is backed out too much the blade will ride too far forward on the drive wheel, even though it's still possible to adjust the tilt so the blade is in the right place on the upper wheel.
What I did was screw the fixing screw in as far as it would go (after backing out the tilt-adjusting screw) and then in an incremental fashion work on getting the tracking correct.? This way the fixing screw is backed out just enough to get enough tilt:? and now the blade rides just fine on both wheels.? There also is much less variation in the tracking as I change the blade tension.
The bottom line is that there's a _lot_ of adjustment range in the tilt mechanism, perhaps to accommodate large manufacturing tolerances:? but as a result it's easy to get into trouble.
I also spent a lot of time adjusting the guides and now the saw is cutting pretty square.? Not perfect, but better than it was.? I used the ruler-clipped-to-the-blade approach:? and it IS important to go back and forth between the upper and lower guides.? If one guide is way off there's no way to get the blade nearest the other one to be perfectly vertical (at least in my experience).
Mark
