5 Expert Table Saw Tips

[Music] hi I'm Nicki angler author of woodworking wisdom and a few other woodworking books and I'm going to show you a few professional secrets tips and techniques that will improve the ease and accuracy of your table sawing operations got a crosscut aboard to a specific length so first of all you measure that length in this case I'm just gonna measure 12 inches make a mark at 12 and then I always like to take a square and extend that mark at least a inch or two so I can make sure that the cut is following the line now how do you line up your mark with the saw blade well you can eyeball it and hope you're on right on the money and you almost never are some people like to to move the wood a little past the cut and then creep up on it making successive cuts until they finally get weather where they're going but there's a much simpler way you can simply take your square put it right on your mark and then move the wood until it just touches the tooth of the blade there we go we're lined up to make the cut like I said right on the money okay how do you know that the cuts you make are perfectly square and that your miter gauge is set to a perfect 90 degrees well you can use a square of course and a fence as long as the fence is parallel to the blade you can use a square to check that your miter gauge is square to your fence so that's pretty close but it's not precision to absolutely be sure take a scrap of wood we're going to make an X somewhere in the middle of that scrap and we're going to cut through the X okay now we're going to take this scrap and we're gonna put it against the fence which we know is perfectly straight okay now that goes together pretty darn good but if I flip it it should also go together up there's a gap there's a small gap right there against the edge that's against the fence at the face okay if that happens I've got to move my miter gauge counterclockwise just a hair now that should be square if the gap had been on the other side away from the fence I would have had to move the miter gauge clockwise let's try this once more and more time and see if I've corrected the problem there you go perfect [Music] when you're ripping a piece of wood and the wood has been properly dried or sometimes it's just the wood itself the kerf the cut left by the blade will begin to close behind the blade and pinch the blade this is due to what is called reaction wood there are tensions in the wood that cause the wood to distort as you relieve it by cutting it now if you don't have a splitter and this is a problem for you you can keep a few wedges handy and put those in the cut behind the blade show you just start the cut let the blade come to a full stop put the wedge in there we go [Music] [Applause] that's it [Music] every now and then you may have to cut a piece of plastic on your table saw and it's very unlikely that you'll be keeping a plastic blade around because it's so infrequent but don't worry you can make a good cut in plastic with a plywood blade or something with a lot of teeth just turn the blade around so the teeth are facing backwards this helps clear the guts so you don't they don't get filled up with plastic shavings and begin to melt making a burned crispy cut here I'll show you I've got a plywood blade on here and as you can see the teeth are facing away from the direction of the cut [Music] [Laughter] now we had a little melting going one you can see that these pieces have have fused but the cut itself is real clean [Music] you want to make a bevel rip and it's got to be precise very accurate that means you have to tilt the saw blade to a precise angle now the old way to do this what's to use a sliding T bevel and a projector now let's say that we want to tilt this to tilt at 22 and 1/2 degrees the blade is actually set at 90 degrees so 22 and 1/2 from 90 is 67 and 1/2 so we set the protractor to 67 and 1/2 degrees and we take the sliding T bevel and we set that to the same angle now we're going to tilt the saw blade until the edge of the sliding T bevel touches the blade all along the face and right there is pretty good ok that's not a bad way to do it but you can get a lot more accurate if you have an inkling ok these measure these measure the angle digitally and the measure to a tenth of a degree now we're going to take this got it turned on here and we're going to zero this out first of all now I've got it turned away from me so I'm gonna have to ask my buddy Travis to see if that is on 0.0 ok all right he says I got it now I'm gonna put this on the blade and what am i reading right now sixty seven point six so I'm a tenth of a degree off ok that may not seem like a like a lot but if we were making an octagon which which has mitered angles of 22 and 1/2 degrees all the way around that's 8 angles and by the time we get to the last angle we'd be almost 1/8 of a where we would be point 8 degrees off almost an entire degree off enough to show a gap so we're going to let's see I'm going to turn this just a little bit and try to get to 67 and a half tell me if I'm good I'm going in the right direction is that the right direction or the wrong direction wrong direction okay let's go back tell me who right there okay 67 and a half degrees precisely [Music] you can also use this in kilometer to set the miter gauge precisely if you want to just take the miter gauge itself and you'll notice I have an extension on it clamp the extension to the saw table there we go now we'll take the inclined honor we'll zero this out yeah it's already at zero and then we stick it to the miter gauge and it should read ninety and it comes awfully close now we're going to angle the miter gauge and let's do sixty seven and a half degrees like we did with the blade angle we're okay that's what sixty six point four come back a little bit sixty seven point three point four because it when I turn type it down sixty seven point four oh there we go sixty seven point five so now when I cut with this I'll be making a twenty-two and a half degree angle [Music]

Channel: Workshop Companion

Views: 550,418

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Length: 11min 18sec (678 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 23 2020