Scroll Saw Cutting for Beginners Pt 2

now that our projects all cut out patterned and drilled we're ready to move on to the cutting phase before we start getting too far ahead of ourselves a couple things we need to check on the saw before we go ahead and start cutting as you can see first of all my blades not square that's angled to the left we'll take care of that in a second the blade I have installed is a Flying Dutchman ultra reverse number three the ultra reverse means that it has a few teeth on the bottom pointing up and the rest of the teeth are pointing down you always want your teeth to point down when you're cutting any type of scroll saw project the three or four teeth on the bottom pointing up help eliminate the fuzzies that you would normally get if you didn't have those on the back of your project I also have the blade tensioned that's a good tension that's the way it should sound on your saw as well now to get our blade set up I'm going to use the same piece of the same block that I used on setting the drill press up this will only take a second I just turn my knob to get or in your case if you don't have this style of saw if you have to adjust your table you just adjust your table until the blade fits into the groove lock it now and now you know without a doubt your blade is perfectly 90 degrees to the table just like on drilling it's extremely important and it's also more important with the thicker wood you're working even if you're off a quarter of a degree the thicker the wood is that's going to get exaggerated and your cut will come out crooked and it's just a pain in the rear okay so let's move on to cutting our project out I consider a scroll saw cutting to be a lot like driving a car when you're driving a car you never hold the steering wheel perfectly straight you're constantly adjusting a little bit left a little bit right to be able to drive in a straight line due to a different variable such as your alignment road conditions a road might be uneven so you're constantly moving that steering wheel back and forth just a little bit and to the point where you probably don't even realize it anymore if you've been driving for any length the time scroll saw cutting is the same way I'm going to show you here I've got a square lined up on the table so that I will try to steer perfectly straight into the blade and you'll see how that doesn't work if this is compared to holding the steering wheel perfectly straight and not moving it do you see how it's come off the line just by pushing it straight into the blade as you can see the blade just naturally came off of the line has nothing to do with your saw it's all about the blade and the way blades are made because they're stamped out and the blades are basically do most of the cutting on the right hand side the blade wants to naturally draw to the right hand side so you will never be able to cut a perfectly straight line simply by pushing the wood straight into the blade a lot of people think their saw is broken and return their saws because they can't cut a straight line well again it's it's not the saw it's the blades and it's just an in it's an inherit beast with a scroll saw so you need to learn to overcome that in order for me to cut a straight line I need to steer the wood into the blade just like I'm steering the car down the road I need to make sure that I'm steering the wood into the blade so here we'll make a correction to get back onto the line and just so you know because I'm filming this I'm doing it with one hand okay so now I'm just make little teeny tiny adjustments as I cut I'm watching the line to make sure the line space or the blade stays on the line there and that's basically how you cut a straight line you can go ahead and cut a all the way down and do it as many times as you need until you can stay on that line and steer your wood into the blade so that you get a nice straight line one thing I haven't talked about yet is the speed that we set our saw at if you have a single speed saw you have no choice but to leave it at the highest speed I would assume some people have two speeds if that's the case I would run it on medium as much as possible because the higher you have your saw set the faster the more wear and tear it is on the saw for no real reason and it also makes it more difficult to control your cutting I find running it 1/2 to 3/4 is usually pretty good for pretty much almost all the what I cut this piece of wood is 3/8 inch thick so I'm going probably 5/8 right in between 1/2 and 3/4 speed so that said let's get to doing our first 90-degree turn we're going to start off by cutting a straight line up and then we'll make our turn and there's two ways to do it that I do it anyway so we'll start by just cutting up our line again we're steering it to keep it straight a little bit of just of adjustment here and there and when we get to the point of the turn this is where it gets a little bit tricky what you want to do is you want to spin the wood while the blade is moving and pulling your wood against the back of the blade because there's no teeth on the blade and the blade won't cut so the front of the blade will cut as you turn into the new line or the 90 and you're holding the wood against the back of the blade while you're making the turn like that I sure you couldn't tell but I was pulling against the back of the blade then we just go ahead and make our cut and then you just spin it and back it out the next one I'll show you is what I call as a loop and what we'll do is we'll cut to the end and then we'll make a little loop into the waste area this only works if you can do it into the part of the project that's not being saved the piece you're going to throw away the waste piece so then that looks like this good get to the end and then we just simply go into the waste area for a nice little time take a little piece out and then you can come in get your straight little line and now you've got a perfect 90 degrees there without any roundover at all that you might have gotten from the first cut just by doing that little turn okay so next thing we're going to do is we're going to loosen attention up on our blade unhook the bottom this is called top feeding so now since we have a hole to start with just going to feed in through the top drop the blade and reconnect it on the bottom tension tighten up our tension and now we'll just continue to cut as you can see I'm not pushing hard into the blade I'm letting the blade do the work I'm not bending the blade by pushing on it too hard or too fast because all that does is cause you to break blades you let the blade do the cutting and as you go on you'll get the feel for that I'm sure you'll probably break a few blades at first but that always happens ok so now we just need to come and do our intersection it's going to be very like the firt very much like the first one we did I'm going to line it up on the line and spin the wood and keeping the pressure of the wood on the back of the blade so that we get a nice sharp turn on to our line okay that's the gist of that that's the two basic cuts and you can work on line C and do it both ways try it the loop style on some of them and and the regular holding the blade to the back of the wood while you turn I'm back to camera up a little bit so you can see my hands on curves because curves a little bit different you need to have your non-dominant hand if you're right-handed it's use your left hand to beat kind of a pivot point as you're steering with your right hand the pivot point isn't solid it has to float with the project because it's not going to be in one spot all the time but you want to have a decent a little bit of pressure there to keep it from wiggling so here we go here's a start of a curve I'll keep one finger there came off the wire a little bit let us back right into it all the line and move your pivot point as you need to steering with your right hand or left hand if s your dominant take your time there's no hurry with fall sign you can move your pivot point as you need to you know there's a lot of people out there to do videos it looks like they're going really fast and everything and you know as a beginner you want to get good at it and be like them and be real fast and everything well first of all it's not necessary to go fast it's not a race and second of all you gotta realize these people have been doing it for years there's got a lot of experience under their belts so as a beginner don't be intimidated by what looks like these people making perfect cuts and going really fast after you do it a few years you'll be doing the same thing so anyway that's enough of that you can finish the cutout that there's basically nothing till it's just take your time stay on the line don't push too hard uh that's that's the thing that's going to screw you up the most is pushing too hard I'm going to cut the spiral out or at least part of it so you guys can see it's actually a little bit more difficult than it actually looks you're constantly moving the wood steering the wood onto your line doing your best to keep the blade on the line don't get frustrated if you have problems just slowly come back into the line it's it's kind of a actual difficult little item to cut so let's get to it and I'll explain a few things as we're going first thing make sure your blade is tensioned properly get into a habit of doing that here that that's good to go so here we go I'm just constantly steering watching my line very closely going nice and slow I'm not in a hurry what's more important is staying on the line I don't care about speed however long it takes me to finish this is what it takes to finish it I'm not trying to impress anybody but just take your time stay on the line constantly steering your piece of wood into the blade when you get to this point where you've cut the wood out here and all the way around here it becomes weak here so from here on out this is going to vibrate which is going to make this cut even more difficult so what we want to do is we want to keep a finger even to possibly on this loose piece of wood first of all it's more fragile and if this was a smaller piece it could easily break if you're doing a very small piece of fret work so you want to hold it down as you're cutting it to prevent it from breaking you're still moving your pivot point not pressing real hard just firmly enough to get the loop of jumping still staying on the line constantly spinning very slowly as you can see if I take my finger off now well you might not be able to say it but all the would start spinning starts jumping we just keep moving in I've got my blankie setup about 3/4 speed doesn't need to be any higher than that the faster your blade goes up and down the harder it is to control especially on cuts like this okay now at that point we can do two things we can either back it up like this and go all the way back out or simply take loosen the blade up and take the blade out which is my preferred method okay now on to the circles the way I like to start a circle is if I drill a hole as you can see here the holes a little bit above the line I do that on purpose because I don't want the hole to be directly on the line I want to nibble a blade slot for my blade to fit in so that I can turn it and get it started on the circle and it's perfectly flat so this is how I do that I just come up to the line and nibble it out a little bit all right up to the line now I've got a nice little spot so that when I turn my blade or turn the piece of wood my blade is starting right on the line of the circle and then we just go ahead and you know the drill by now I'm not going to show you the whole circle but you can just cut the rest of the circle out stay on the line take your time and don't be in a hurry and you'll get a quality piece of you'll get a quality cut out of it okay I got the little circle cut out the big circle is the same thing I have the hole cut off a little bit off of the line so I'm going to do the same thing again just to show you one more time just going to nibble just to the backside of the line just to give me enough room to be able to get the blade to fit in there I like going down a little bit more and then just stay on your life long as you stay on your line you're going to have a perfect circle if you wiggle off the line the circle is not going to look so good so with geometric shapes like circles squares triangles etc you really need to be on your line on those because the eye will pick up any deviation and it just won't look right so on geometric patterns it's really important that you stay on your line okay now it's time to hit the final exam there's a couple things I want to show you that I haven't covered yet so that you can actually do this properly let me just start by already cut a line here this V here is sharper than 90 degrees so it's a little bit different to handle what I want to show you is in order to make this a perfect V we just come back spin it around 100 spin the blade around 180 degrees then you come back in and you can attack the line follow the line straight and now this is the other this is the other item I want to show you this is called a veining line it's typically used for highlights and portraits and fretwork type of scroll saw cutting so in order to come into that line what we're going to do is we're just going to bypass it going to go right past it we get to the top and we're going to make a loop just a quick little sharp loop now with the loop we can go down this line put in this instance we're going to come back and come back into the veining line - a quick little cuddle or rainy line now we can come back up to our loop and continue on okay with we're going into another sharper than ninety degree angle here so we just bring the blade back a little bit give it a hundred and eighty degree turn okay go back and attack our life with cutting like this sometimes you don't need this piece if you don't need this piece get it out of the way you know all it does is sit there or vibrate and cause more problems so don't be afraid cut it off and get rid of it and that way you can also see how well you did on your cuts see these are perfect feasts there's no overrun there's no rounding which makes your work look much better more professional we've got another very sharp turn here so I'm just going to come in here real quick and show you it's the same thing as the same process as the two we just did I want to take a shortcut and cut in here to come down our wine stop at the very bottom of the line back it up into the waist area turn 180 degrees bring the back of the blade into the bottom of the slot and then go in and look hopefully you'll do it better than that don't let it make your cut get rid of this piece if you want to you don't have to but that's not hard to do okay so that should be everything you need to know about finishing cutting the final exam outline F if you can cut this final exam outline F without any problems and it looks good and you got nice sharp turns and nice pretty little curves then you can feel pretty comfortable with your cutting ability and probably don't need to do this much more other than maybe reflection once in a while and speaking of refreshing on some scroll saw projects that you'll be doing you'll probably want to spend a little bit of extra money on some decent wood like you know curly maple or walnut or Purple Heart and you really don't want to screw those up just go ahead and print out a copy of this practice guide and slap it on a piece of scrap wood practice for a couple minutes before you start cutting on the expensive wood because believe me you don't really want to be throwing that stuff away because you screw it up well anyway I really hope you enjoyed this video if you did please like it if you have any comments leave them below or if you really feel the need to go ahead and email me at bob dot you WT @ gmail.com and i look forward to hearing from you and as always happy scrolling

Channel: ScrollSawParadise

Views: 685,392

Rating: 4.9190497 out of 5

Keywords: Scroll Saw, Scrollsaw, Scroll Saw Cutting, Scroll saw beginners, Scroll saw video, scroll saw practice, Scroll saw tutorial, scroll saw drilling, scroll saw cutting guide, Free scroll saw pattern, Free scroll saw cutting Guide, Hobby (Interest), Do It Yourself (Hobby), diy, makers, millenials

Id: 8WYw855pI04

Length: 23min 38sec (1418 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 21 2013