Wood Doctor, our OP, has told us he has a generous amount of space in his "Man Cave" which he describes as being 38' x 30' divided by a center wall into two spaces 38' x 15' I interpret this to mean the working space is at grade level with a double car garage door as access to receive lumber and plywood as well as move out finished cabinets. What is less clear is the amount of available electrical power.
To be sure, not all cabinets are built in the same way. Since the end of WWII the cases for a high percentage of cabinets have been made from plywood or another type of sheet goods. Traditionally face frames were made of solid lumber, but an increasing percentage of cabinets are frameless. Cabinet doors and drawer fronts can be built in many ways, some of which involve gluing-up jointed and planed planks.
From the beautiful photos shared by Wood Doctor he has a lot of talent and experience. He also is willing to maintain his equipment.
My first concern is that the space is divided into long narrow rooms, which could well frustrate movement of materials in this shop. For example, where will the uncut sheet material be stored prior to being broken down? Stored flat a stack of 4x8' sheets eats up a lot of floor space.
Not all sliding table saws are equal. Even the largest and most powerful sliding table saws, such as the Felder Kappa 550 E-motion I own, can be inconvenient for a person working alone when breaking down full sheets. In addition to the saw itself, even with the slide you still need in-feed and out-feed support. Like any table saw to rip an 8' long sheet you need about 20' in line with the blade. To cross-cut you need some working room beyond the rip fence and at least 8' on the other side of the blade, or a total of 12+ feet wide by 20+ feet long. All by itself a cabinet-style sliding table saw will use nearly all the space in one of those 15' x 38' rooms.
Jointers and thickness planers can also eat up a lot of space. It is really frustrating to need to join and plane 12' long stock without good in and out feed support in a space over 24' long. Yes, it is entirely possible to buy and use combination machines which convert from jointer to planer. The problem is that hardly ever, in the real world, is it practical to join a stack of lumber prior to converting the machine to planer mode. Normally it makes better sense to smooth one side of a plank using a wide jointer and then run that same plank through a thickness planer to bring it to almost the desired thickness. After that normally the plank would be turned on one edge so that can be rendered smooth and at the desired angle relative to the two smooth faces. Perhaps then the still rough side of the plank will be run through a saw to rip it to almost the desired width. Now that plank need to be stored for several hours before being planed to final desired thickness and the ripped edge of the plank joined. Imagine how much less frustrating those operations are when the table saw, jointer and planer are all set up and ready to use side by side?
Traditionally sheet material is not processed on a jointer. So most of the time what is needed is a "glue-ready" edge. Obtaining such a glue-ready edge with a manually fed table saw is hardly a sure thing, even aided by a sliding table. Remember the material between the blade and the rip fence is not on the slider, so it can be scratched by the table. This is why the pressure beam saws were invented. The sheet is moved into position on an air table. Then the air is turned off and the pressure beams on each side of the blade clamp the material. Only then is the blade moved through the material from below. Normally beam saws have a scoring unit, but that is controlled by the same CNC commands as all the other aspects of the cut. The downside is that pressure beam saws to not have tilting blades and they are not intended for miter cuts.
So, how does a hand pushed track saw, such as a Festool TSxx, compare? I like to think of my very large beam saw as a Festool TSxx on steroids and upside down, with four guide rails and splinter guards all clamped together very tightly to reduce tear-out. A downside to my Holzma 14' beam saw is that it needs a 25' x 25' dedicated space, uses a lot of 480v 3 phase power and cost more than 125 TS55s with 5000mm rails. And, although it makes marvelous glue-ready cuts, none of those can be bevels. Beam saws only do right angles in all directions.
My shop is built around a big CNC nested router, the large beam saw and the large Kappa 550 CNC sliding table saw. Still, near all of those is my 18' x 4' cutting table where I use TS55s and guide rails ranging from 1400mm to 5000mm to perform all those cuts which are inconvenient and inefficient to make on the slider saw and impossible to make on the beam saw. I find that I save so much time using the beam saw for the 90+ percent of cuts of sheet material it can do that I can afford the time to make those pesky 10% of cabinet parts involving miters and/or bevels.
Unfortunately to provide room to actually use all those machines, as well as the router tables, shaper, jointer, thickness planer, horizontal resaw band saw and other machines, along with room to store enough raw material, assemble the cabinets and store them until shipment, my shop has a manufacturing space 66' x 210' clear span, plus another 5000 square feet of additional smaller rooms for offices, parts and tool storage, the CAD department and so on.
Thus, when we compare the use of guide rails and a TS55 to any kind of sliding table saw we need to consider the shape of the available space, the volume of work and electricity. I would not care to make the number of cabinets I produce with a staff of 6 cabinet makers and another 6 employees in a smaller space. I cannot conceive of justifying so much space to build personal projects. I have used many brands and styles of sliding table saws for almost 50 years, and yet I have never felt comfortable using such a saw without the help of another person.
Before I had my large shop I built thousands of cabinets by myself using TS55s on guide rails but then each of my work rooms was only 18' wide by 36' long. So, the size of the work shop is a big factor in selection of machines and methods.
Oh yes, part of the extra 5000 square feet in my facility is a kitchen and a place to relax. We have 3 ADA compliant rest rooms, two with showers, because after building cabinets we need to wash up. Unfortunately because of the narrow minds of the insurance agents we cannot stock beer in my building.
