I had a couple emails today about the Bigfoot lift device I reviewed yesterday. A question arose about the foot getting in the way when trying to thread the blade through a work piece. I just want to clear that up. Look at the attached picture and you will see a 10 inch X 10 inch board with an entry hole right in the center. Because you can rotate the board this is the extreme point of an entry hole. As you can see the Bigfoot allows this 10 inch board to be accommodated without problem. Understand this is only while you are threading the blade. The Bigfoot lifts while cutting. Most entry holes are going to be closer than dead center so even larger boards will usually not be a problem as far as I can tell. When I received the first email today I removed the blog post with the review out of caution. After getting home from work I went to the shop and took another look to see if my opinion had changed. I still like the Bigfoot even with this small limitation. I would be willing to say that 99 percent of the 1000+ patterns in my catalog could be cut using the Bigfoot attachment. If you regularly cut large boards then you might want to consider another option. I'm still impressed with the simplicity and low cost of the product. I'm also impressed with the owner and designer of the Bigfoot. I talked personally with him today and he has a caring attitude about his customers and his product.
I will be reconstructing the original blog post so it will be duplicated as another email newsletter. Sorry for the duplication but I don't think I can prevent it because the feed is automatic. Deleting the original post also caused an older post to go out around 3pm today. Again sorry for the issue but the service I use called Feedburner can be finicky sometimes.