Advanced Miter Saw Techniques - Tricks You've Probably Never Seen

what's up guys welcome back to the channel i want to do a video on an advanced miter saw skill that i just got done using and i don't think i've ever seen anybody else talk about this online i've never seen any other videos on it read any articles on it etc but if you know this trick you can use it to your advantage to really increase your efficiency and accuracy let me show you what we're going to be talking about by now a lot of you guys have probably seen the video where i install this wayne's coating and this wayne's coating has an inset beaded trim going all the way around the interior of all of these one bys so look at all of these vertical pieces of beaded trim that i had to cut what i was able to do was use a stop block to batch cut all of these styles so they're the exact same length so then my 32 pieces of beaded molding i was able to use the stop block for those also and then i also showed how i cut the horizontal pieces with a stop block as well here's the trick i wanted to point out to you got my stop block set up let's say for example i'm cutting my vertical styles for wayne's coating i'm going to bump my style up to my stop block okay so that's cut now i need to cut my beaded molding that'll go to the inside of that i actually don't even have to move my stop block watch this we'll put a 45 on the back on this side now we'll rotate back to 45 again keeping the long point against my miter saw fence i'll bump this to my stop block cut it now look what happens whenever i align the ends of this beaded trim i've got it lined up with my miter on the end here and on the other side it is the exact same length so using that stop block you can actually cut long 45 degree miters and it'll come out the exact same length as whenever you use the stop block and cut it off square so what's actually happening here now this is an advanced miter saw video so try and hang with me here there are two planes that we need to think about with the principle that we're talking about you've got the plane of the blade this is your blade traveling in this direction again assuming it is perfectly perpendicular the other plane we need to think about is the plane of our miter saw fences so we have two planes intersecting exactly at 90 degrees now the interesting thing about the way they've designed this dewalt dws 780 miter saw is there's also a pivot point and that pivot point is exactly where those two planes pivot okay so whenever you rotate your miter on your saw your fence is going to stay the same but your blade is pivoting there is an exact point where that pivots and they have designed this saw so that pivot point is directly at that intersection underneath where these two planes come together so what that allows to happen then is you can use your stop block and make a square cut and then rotate it to 45 degrees and the pivot point stays pretty much exactly the same on the right side of the blade it's you have to consider it also that if you think about it that pivot point is thrown off by the thickness of your blade so if you try to use this is very important you cannot use the stop block on the left side of the saw because the pivot point actually is where this arbor is on the right side of your blade not on your left being on the left side of the blade actually throws it off so those two pieces will not be the same length but on my saw that pivot point is exactly on the right side of the saw so i can cut square cuts and 45 degree cuts and get the exact same length and if you understand that it's a huge time saver and money maker whenever you are doing something like a beaded molding on the inside of wayne's coating and again here just to kind of give you another visual i put two pencil lines here this represents our miter saw fence this represents our blade that pivot point is back here and it's on the right side of our blade so that exact point is an extremely tight margin point that i'm sure they designed on their computer system when they designed this miter saw but it is right there so whenever you move that blade that pivot point stave it stays in the exact same location because the way they've built the saw that bolt down there that the the saw pivots on it's in that exact correct point now i'd be interested i would be interested for you guys with the other miter saw brands that you're using to test this out and let me know if it works on your miter saw works on this dws 780 i know obviously if i grab if i grab my auxiliary fences here which are about an eighth of an inch thick that pivot point no longer works the same way because it these auxiliary fences throw off the location of where it's pivoting actually it doesn't throw off where it's pivoting it throws off the way that it's cutting the wood so i guess it does throw off the way it's pivoting point being if you put auxiliary fences on it will not work any longer and that's why you see me whenever i'm using my stop block to batch cut mitered window and door casing i never have my auxiliary fences on because it throws the whole system off it doesn't work that way so what are some ways that we can use this knowledge to be more efficient and accurate in our work many of you have seen me use my miter saw stop block system here basically i have a two piece stop block that actually has an offsetting piece here the reason that i have done that is because that's how i use it with mitered casing so the first thing that i do i have a magnetic tape on my saw so i can always calibrate my stop block to the miter saw each time i set up my miter saw wings that way if something is off a little bit all i've got to do is slide this steel tape back and forth on the top of this magnet and it's really easy to calibrate so how would i calibrate this well let's say we're getting ready to start trimming a house and i want to make sure that my stock stop block is calibrated to my miter saw so i just pick some arbitrary number here i put my little red cross hair which you see here on 32 so now what i'll do is take a piece of scrap and just bump it up against my stop block here carefully cut it one-handed okay so now i can take this out so now i can take my tape measure out and check it and see if i'm exactly on 32 inches which i am here it is right on the money on 32 inches now let's say for example that this piece came out at 32 and an eighth instead of 32 that would mean i need to recalibrate my tape to my stop block so i would just pull up my magnetic tape and i would pull it over an eighth of an inch until my red cross hair was right on 32 and an eighth so then this point of my stop block the face on the top portion would be calibrated to the edge of my saw blade so now why have a two-tiered stop block well whenever you're cutting mitered casing you always measure from the inside point of your miter so in order for my tape measure here to remain calibrated with the saw i need to offset this bottom stop block double the thickness of my mitered casing so here i have three and a half inch casing so what i would simply do is i've even got a little tape measure on here look at the seven there i align this back edge of my stop block with the seven inch right there so now with my stop block offset seven inches i'll just lift it up a hair let me go ahead and cut a 45 on this end now again the stop block is still set at 32 inches where i've left it this entire time and we'll butt the long point up to the lower tier of my stop block which is offset seven inches we'll turn the miter saw back the other way okay now we've cut that miter now the beautiful thing is the inside to inside dimension is going to be 32 inches so i'll just line up the inside of my miter here inside of my miters lined up with that inside edge of my crown stop i'm going to hook my tape on there and we will pull it over here and look at our measurement exactly 32 inside to inside so that is what this offset stop block does allows you to use your your gauge block here put it right on uh the 32 where you want it and you can use your inside to inside measurements to cut mitered casing for windows and doors but wait there's more uses uh whenever we use this principle what if i want it to be 32 inches from the outside of my miter to the outside of my miter well i'll just bump my stop block all the way down so now i'm using the front edge of the stop block i've already got a 45 degree cut here so we'll push this over bump the front edge of that miter up against the stop block let me pull out my tape measure i will hook it on the end here as you can see we're at 32 inches again so again the whole reason that this is possible is because of the way the planes of the miter saw fence and your blade intersect at this exact pivot point so hopefully your saws do this as well i honestly don't know if all saws are designed this way or not but this is how my saw works and in the waynes coating that i just installed it saved me a ton of time having that inset beaded trim being able to batch cut that just worked incredibly well i'm going to show you one more trick that i used on this project for this wayne's coating now we've already talked a little bit about batch cutting our vertical styles so that they're all the exact same length using a stop block then obviously based off of what we've just been talking about we can leave that stop block set up in the exact same position and even cutting it 45 degrees we can still get the same length for our vertical pieces of bead molding that go in on the inside of this whole room for our wainscoting now what about these horizontal pieces is it possible to batch cut those accurately as well using these same principles and the answer is yes what you want to do whenever you're pre-assembling your wainscoting and you're spacing your pieces here you want to figure out using math what your approximate spacing is going to be so in this case i've got 23 and a half inches so then i would cut a little piece of scrap at 23 and a half inches and i would use that as a spacer as i'm assembling my one by material the whole way i would keep using this uh gauge block as i assembled my styles to the rail so i'd start on one end use the gauge block attach this one use the gauge block to space between this one and this one attach it use the gauge block again so you would end up with the exact same spacing on all of your boxes beside the besides the very last box you're not going to be able to be accurate enough to get the exact same spacing on your last box so that one will be have to be manually measured measured manually but the rest of these we can get all of the exact same spacing so there's a trick that you can use again with your stop block so that you can go right into cutting these horizontal pieces of beaded molding as well and all you need is this scrap piece of wood that you used as a spacer let me show you how that works we're going to use the same principles that i was talking about before remember the pivot point that is right here at the center of your miter saw along the back of this fence doesn't matter whether you're cutting it square or at a 5 45 degree angle that pivot point is the exact same so what i can actually do here i'm going to take the gauge block that i used to space my styles apart i'm going to set it right here and i'm going to bump it up against my stop block remember i don't want to move that stop block because i want to keep using it for all these other wall sections i don't want to touch that thing so i'm going to put my gauge block that i just used here which is 25 and 11 16. now i'm going to take a scrap board and what i'm going to do is actually create another stop block to offset this one so my scrap board here i'm going to carefully bump that up against my gauge block okay we've cut that off square now we're going to switch this around and i'm going to take this off cut now push that up against my stop block carefully now watch what happens let's cut another piece of bead molding [Applause] see if it fits keep in mind these three sections are all exactly the same i used the gauge block on these put that in here perfectly snug rock it in here perfectly snug again no measuring didn't get out my tape measure one time and now i can batch cut all of these pieces just by using this stop block system and thinking ahead it really increases your productivity so as you can see guys this is an amazing trick it will save you so much time on a job like this where you've got a bunch of small pieces of trim to install it's accurate it's given me great results here and i really wanted to share it it's why i wanted to do a dedicated video on this principle to really convey how if you understand the way the planes of your miter saw work and where the pivot point is you can use that to your advantage and how you use your saw so i hope this all makes sense let me know in the video comments what you think did you know this or didn't you know this i've never seen anyone else talk about this it's just something that i figured out on my own over the years so hopefully it makes sense to you and hopefully you can use it and hopefully it'll make you some more money and help you be more productive so thanks for watching we'll see you again on the next video [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Insider Carpentry - Spencer Lewis

Views: 268,264

Keywords: insider carpentry, finish carpentry, dewalt miter saw, dws 780, miter saw tricks, stop block, insider carpentry stop block, miter saw technique, miter saw stop block, cutting mitered casing, wainscoting tricks, cutting bead molding, miter saw pivot point, miter saw fences, best miter saw

Id: p1UOgiz3Lfk

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 04 2022