How to Use a Table Saw | Ask This Old House

[Music] Tommy where would you be without your table saw I don't know where I be because we use them all the time and this is a nice big one that we keep in the shop yeah because it's very heavy you need two guys to carry it around at least cabinet saw expensive so a lot of people don't work off of one of these they work up something more portable small portable saws are great they're on the job site all the time we have a few of them going all day long back and forth and this one's pretty cool because it's a battery opera is that right yeah you don't even have to plug it in so you plug the battery in and you're good for a long time a lot of cattle so it's also one of the most dangerous tools out there so you always have to be thinking about safety let's talk about some of the techniques when making cuts to keep us safe all right well first of all you have this this protection right here to keep the sawdust off you try to keep your hands out of there I believe there's a riving knife down here and this riving knife as you push the wood through it lessens the chance of it collapsing on itself or twisting in and then pushing back right which is kickback which we do not want right and these little teeth right here on these spring-loaded things these are called pauls and they actually will dig into the grain if the wood wants to kick back and you can see when you push the wood through there as you run the board through there's a piece on each side of the blade and it comes through in these little spring-loaded teeth pick up yeah and then if this thing was going to kick back it would the teeth would dig in and it won't kick back at you right all right so let's make sure that we've got those on anytime we're using it a rip cut let's talk about that yep a rip cut is when you go and you set the RIP fence the distance from the blade and let's say I make it here and now I want to run it through and I want to make a cut yeah now what you don't want to do when you're doing a rip cut is first of all you want I always keep my hand here and I want to make sure I'm pushing the wood against the RIP fence yeah I'm not looking at the cut I'm looking at the position of the board in relationship to the RIP fence if there's a gap or a space on one end or this end I'm not holding straight right so push it up there tight although it is possible that they're not parallel right yes and that's when you have to think about your adjustments yeah so you want to make sure that this fence is parallel with that blade let me take this off so you can see right here we've got the battery out we've got this thing shut down yep all right so the first thing I would do and I take out a saw I eyeball it and I put the blade up as high as it will go mm-hmm and I just eyeball it and I can look like all right so now if I lock that in I look at the space between the blade here and the blade here to make sure that it's parallel looks pretty good right looks pretty good but I can check it so by checking it I'm going to create a space right here and the space is big enough first thing I would check is the distance from my rip fence to one of these two dedos okay a check here four and a half four and a half now that's just random I locked it in this is has to be locked in the other thing I want to do is I want to make sure that it's parallel to the blade because you know these sides get thrown around they come out of trucks you guys drop them they pick them up they throw them around yep so what you want to do is you want to pick one of the teeth yeah all right because you have offsetting teeth let me show you this combination blade right here if you look at the teeth one points to the right one points to the left yeah all right so if I measure from the wrong tooth there's a little bit of a difference distance that's going to show me that I'm out of parallel okay so to find out I'm in parallel I'm going to pick a tooth I'm going to say right there so now I have nine and a half inches from this side of this tooth I'm going to take this tooth and I'm going to rotate it back here and I'm going to measure again all right nine and a half inches gotcha so this fence is parallel to the saw and but really parallel to the blade right which is key and that's actually going to help us be safer by minimizing kickback right now when making a rip cut or a cross cut I like to first set the saw blade so that it just comes through alright maybe quarter to a half an inch up at the most alright that lessens the chance for kickback right and we want that blade height set correctly whether we're doing a rip cut or cross cut exactly but when we're doing a cross cut we're going to take the fence pretty much out of the equation right and let me show you here what what happens if I use the fence in the blade is there let's say I want to cut a bunch of boards and I want them to be like eight inches long I would never take this piece here and run this through because look what can happen if I'm pushing this with more leverage and holding this with less leverage this board can jam in between the two and kick back and when it kicks back it happened so quick I've seen it happen on the jobsite I've seen it happen in school when I was a kid a kid was cutting the saw pushing the board through a kickback and the blade was not up too high so he didn't lose his fingers he just nicked them all it could drag your hand across a blade it'll definitely throw that back at you the bad situation right and that's why I like the blade to just come up a little bit so we don't use the fence right you don't use the fence you use this to make your cross cut you put it on here you hold it down firm to the table and you pull it together and you push it across leaving a gap here between the end of the fence right now let's say I want to cut multiple pieces that length yeah first thing you do is you take the scrap piece of wood you take a measurement from the scrap piece of wood to the edge of the blade that you want whatever it is I then take this scrap piece of wood I slide it all the way down to the very beginning of the rip bends mm-hmm so now I have a guide or a stop that I can put my board against hold it tight to the crosscut guy that's going to set our length right now you see that this board is against this stop before it meets the blade now when I push it through as they go through there's a gap board here is the gap the board can fall off and I can take and move it out of the way it won't get caught on the blade good Larry Tommy well I love to see the battery coming into the in the vogue here for these songs lead to some good safety tips thank you thanks for watching this whole house has got a video for just about every home improvement project so be sure to check out the others and if you're likely to see click on the subscribe button make sure that you get our newest videos writing your feed

Channel: This Old House

Views: 153,426

Rating: 4.9124408 out of 5

Keywords: tom silva, kevin o'connor, table saw, safety, This Old House, Ask This Old House, DIY, Home Improvement, DIY Ideas, Renovation, Renovation Ideas, How To Fix, How To Install, How To Build, Kevin o’connor, kevin o'connor house, kevin o'connor this old house, kevin o'connor ask this old house, kevin o'connor interview, tom silva this old house, tom silva house, tom silva construction, tom silva tools, tommy silva

Id: eEWu4xcHiGY

Length: 7min 10sec (430 seconds)

Published: Sun May 19 2019