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I am putting the finishing touches on setting up the Powermatic 66 in my home shop and decided a fresh tape would be a welcome inexpensive upgrade. To be honest, I’ve not had experience working in a shop where I trusted the readout on a table saw tape. Either I was working at someone else’s saw or I’ve owned a Frankenstein of a saw that had modified fence bars or something that prevented the tape from being accurate. It took less than 15 minutes to scrape the old tape off and install this one. I’ll spare you the tutorial, but I will say that I am pleased with the tape that I chose to install.
While browsing the options online, I was immediately drawn to the familiar Starrett Measure Stix line of adhesive tapes. However, I stumbled upon the Fastcap Left/Right Adhesive tape and found that it has a couple of nice features over the Starrett. First, it’s wider. I was hoping to find one that was easier to read from the standing position. This was the widest tape I could find. Second, it has call outs on its incremental measurements, all the way down to 16ths.
It hurts my pride a tiny bit to admit that I usually have to do a double take on my tape to make sure I correctly identified the right 16th mark, this should reduce the amount of double checking. Third, there’s a metric rule at the bottom of the tape. Clark Kellog recently shared his reasoning for mixing imperial and metric measurements in his article, Sculpted Side Table in the December 2018 issue of the magazine. Now I have one built-in to my table saw–maybe I’ll use it, maybe not. Finally, the Fastcap tape is 16′ but is printed on both sides, for left and right read. You can potentially use the leftover portion on another project if you’d like.
At this point, I look forward to trusting my table saw tape. It seems like such a luxury to bypass my typical dance with a rule and between the blade and fence.
– David Lyell
The links in this article are affiliate links, however, I did purchase the Fastcap tape with my own money. Not a sponsored post.
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It drives me nuts to have to pull out a tape measure and measure blade to fence on each cut. Must.have.cursor.
I replaced the tape on my SawStop with one from their parts store. It measures to 1/32″ and costs $25 + $13 shipping. This is pricey, but worth it to me. When making fine adjustments, I don’t need the actual values, but having the extra lines makes it easier to see how much you’ are moving it.