Wadkin Bursgreen BGS 12

Introduction

When I bought my Lini L17 in 2016, and although it's a great table saw, it was never meant to be my final saw. During late 2019 I really started to tire of my Lini as it's quite hard to get to perform with precision. Altough the Lini has a slider, it's the older version which is hard to adjust correctly. It also requires quite some space on the width, the slider is difficult to stowe away as it's quite bulky. If it would've been the newer kind of slider which is on the Luna L18 I think I would've stayed with the saw longer.

I started looking for a new saw, and I kind of turned to the Hammer K3. The footprint is small enough for my woodshop, the quality is excellent and it's not Chinese :) The only problems are price and the fact that it's new (which sounds contradictionary, right?). The thing is, I like to restore old machines, and I like the robust feeling of the quality which some old machines have. After having restored my old bandsaw, I thought that maybe I could pull off restoring a larger machine, as long as it wasn't in too bad shape. Then one cold winter evening I watched a YouTube video of a fellow countryman doing a review of a Wadkin table saw. I was blown away and got the Wadkin virus...

The review was of a Wadkin Bursgreen BGS 12 sliding table saw. I then looked around for other vintage table saws with a slider, and with a comparatively small footprint. I found another german brand, Bäuerle, who's also made a saw which could've worked for me, but the Wadkin saws kind of felt better, and I guess they appeal more to my sense of machine beauty and design. I started to monitor the used machine market and in June 2020 I noticed an ad for a saw in the Swedish version of Craigslist, Blocket. The description only mentioned that it was a saw, and the picture was really low resolution and fuzzy. I got excited because I recognized the soft curves of a Wadkin, and the price was really good. I called the seller and said that if it's a Wadkin Bursgreen BGS saw I'll buy it. After just a few days we closed the deal and the saw was mine!