Table saw secret nobody will talk about from the good old days, C&T episode 180

ah [Music] so [Music] howdy folks we're going to talk about the dark secret involving with the table saw halloween or something maybe bringing this on the thing is the safety in regards to where the blade is and there's a lot going on here this is a dangerous piece of equipment probably one of the worst things in the whole shop in fact statistics are showing that the table saw is just about king of cutting fingers and cutting people's hands up and things keep your hands away from the blade but i'm going to show you the schools of thought and i'm also going to show you the dark side of the other school of thought that nobody seems to want to discuss so we're going to discuss both of them today yeah let's go remind remember now this is only for entertainment purposes i'm not telling you how to use your tools [Music] so here's the basics of uh anyone that's wanting to use a table saw i've got a nice piece of 1x4 uh just just some good old pine great egg fine sorry about that you know if you're gonna run it through this saw here and believe the saw is not plugged in so stop typing uh the school of thought is basically this to bring the blade down to where it's just a hair above the cut this is fine but you know a lot of old school guys including me i'll just show you this on the other side that's even better really take a look at that this is what they want you to do and there's some good things here because if you're say you know up here in the middle of the of the cut and your finger somehow your hand slips or something and it gets into this you can see you're barely going to get nicked by the saw at that point so from a safety side this is probably a pretty good idea for generally most people that are first starting out or they don't use the table saw a lot and they're not used to using it this sort of idea is really not that bad the big problem with the sauce that's talked about a lot is mostly kickback but i'm also talking about just just your hand slipping or something sliding or going wrong suddenly you don't want to get into this blade you don't want to get anywhere near it's doing 5000 rpm it'll tear through skin pretty easily and even if you're wearing a bulletproof vest and you get kicked back i think you'll probably still get hurt pretty badly anyways let's get back to this so here's the blade and what's happening if you think about it in terms the blade is pushing against the wood here it's really pushing hard here and it's even pushing down here now of course at this point theoretically this material of the wood is removed so from about here down we no longer really have much in the way of pressure or dewy well yeah we still do because the wood is starting here cut and cut up to here so the only place that's really not pushing too much is on the back side of the blade and this is where the slot has now become you know an open area where there's really not much the side of the of these blades is probably still catching a little bit of the fiber so everything is shoving is going that way hard and heavy and this is why we're talking about this today because and you'll notice this saw doesn't have a kerfing knife which i do want to install something back here to make it safer because i don't want kickback anymore than anybody else does but i just want to take a look and see what's happening and of course like i said uh some people say the the rule of thumb was and i've checked with different wood shops an eighth of an inch other schools have said three-eighths which three-eighths i think is tell you the truth i think it's too high but uh there's other schools that will go up as high as a half inch and then other people will say uh let's see if i can even bring mine down low enough where yeah it's just i mean it is just a hair above this board at this point so you'd almost have to break the board with your hand because you still wouldn't probably go you may just barely break it between the two pieces but that's the safest mode right there plus have a kerfing knife and if you have the plastic guard of course they tell you to use a plastic guard they also tell you to use uh some kind of noise protection on your ears a good old pair of safety glasses i have a pair sitting here and also a dust mask especially around you know sawdust and wood a dust mask is a pretty good thing to have i generally take my saw it's on wheels take it outside of the driveway i cut out there to keep the dust away from me but yeah it's you know this is what they this is what the industry is telling me is this is the way you know keep it real low now i've learned about it more than 50 years ago that keeping the blade up like this now we try to take a look and see what's happening this is now more of a downward force right here so that's a good thing you know because you're going to get a really nice cut but you have all this exposed up here wanting a piece of you or me or whatever and you've got this one here which is now trying to lift the board this way and trying to push the board down this way so again you know you could still get into and still back in the good old days we still had kickback the curfing knife back here has really really taken care of a lot of that and that's that blade is a little bit too high for this cut anyways for a couple of reasons but i like my blade pretty high and i've always learned that that was the way to use the table saw was to keep the blade as high as you can within reason nothing stupid but i'm going to show you something else when your blade is high like that and go right up you now have all this surface area of metal against against the cut lumber and that actually sort of helps a little bit to steer the lumber nice and straight through if everything's lined up good it'll just help to help with this steer straight through when you finish the cut i always let my piece of wood go right off the end and fall i don't i don't keep it up here but a lot of people don't want to talk about this on the wood shows i noticed about keeping the blade a little on the high side i prefer high also i use things so let's take a look at what i use and remember i have never had kickback but i've also when i years ago when i had my saws different saws and i have this one right now these are some of the contraptions i've used this one here to hold the wood down and to push through and control it i also have this one here it's the same idea it's just a wider piece and i've even cut a couple times where i had a small piece of lumber and this way i had both sides held as i went through and cut this one here is for a wider board and again same idea get it on the get it on the board and that way as i'm pushing through i've got full control over what's happening and there's very little chance of this lifting because i've got my hand down like this and i'm going by now i don't want this any closer to my fingers than i have to so if i was making a cut such as like this i would probably bring bring the blade down to around three eighths of an inch to a half an inch above me just so that it's just that much further away from me as i go through and i'm comfortable that's part of the deal now there's also this piece here this is made by well this is a knockoff of course i made this on a 3d printer but it's basically the uh micro jig which has a little tongue back here which again helps and even micro j with making these pieces you'll notice you have this great big area that's well high for the blade to be passing through because remember this is on top of your wood so your blade whatever is up in here is right here i don't think this is fantastic i don't think it's even all that safe there are a couple of problems with it i've had in the past where the wood cut has stopped and the other piece is is you know trying to grab and it's because this lock back here only holds one piece the other the cut side can fly off now we'd have to look at some statistics most of it seems to surround between the blade and the fence seems to be where all the damage is so when you're going through here this piece here could fly off this piece here can fly off but the reality is between the fence and the blade that seems to be what's really gets pinched and out of control and it can you know fling up at you this loose piece over here that's now cut off generally seems to have a tendency to sort of you know fall away from the blade i haven't seen one get into the blade and then come back and hit somebody at least not the cutoff pieces over on the i guess we'll call it the scrap or the the cut off piece of the wood these are the these are just call them safety pieces i also have a push stick which i don't i can't show you right now i don't even know where it is it's i haven't used it for a long time here's a here's a curving knife off of an old saw and i'm like i said i'm looking at uh i move this out of the way a little bit and putting a piece of something back here with maybe you know so that i can put something back here like this so as i'm using the blade the wood can come across across here i've seen a couple of ideas the other idea i really like that i saw was i think it was stubby over there stubby nubs had made one of these up and he put a small like a three quarter inch high kerfing knife back here and that way when he's doing a straight cut the little kirky knife is already in place [Music] right here and 90 degree and i think you could make another one that's say a 45 degree kerfing knife because that's the only two angles on a table saw that i use 99.9 of the time every once well you come up with a specialty i have had to cut you know 12 and a half degree cuts you know stuff like that but very rare you just don't get a lot of it and really the dark thing is that nobody wants to talk about is this whole situation with old school we used to be told to you know keep the blade as relatively high as you can to get the best possible cut so there's two different schools of thought going on here the safety end of it keep the blade down as low as you can less chance of getting nicked or getting into it and i don't have too much of a problem with that i have noticed when i've got the blade down like this i do have a lot of work force going on here where you know the wood wants to fly back it wants to crawl up on here and it wants to get at me kind of thing and i have always been far more comfortable personally keeping it up like that and it just upsets a lot of people and i get a lot of nasty mail about it and saying don't show this to anybody it's a dark secret don't let it out of the bag or something it's really uncommon sense uh i would have to agree with the safety folks out there that yeah keeping the blade like that down by the lumber like this that is probably the safest thing to do and it but when you get old old timer that's been 50 years into it this is probably what you're going to see is you know like that or we've got all kinds of weight over top of that lumber but look at the tools i'm using to control that lumber width i'm not anywhere near my fingers nothing's really that close to that blade and in the 50 plus years of using table saws i have never had kickback i have no injuries and i don't want any injuries off these i like to enjoy this hobby like anybody else i don't want to get hurt i didn't go to the garage to go cut a finger off for the day and i don't want anybody else to either i i just love the idea of the folks getting out there and cut a piece of wood just sometimes it just feels good to cut a piece of wood so just recently about a week ago the denim tools did a list and table saws were number one for getting hurt not good and some people that are fairly well fairly popular names in the industry have been hurt by table saws this one is a beast it has no rhyming knife you know uh there's no plastic guard of course up here and this blade as a matter of fact that's a 12 inch so that's a bad boy respect it you know yeah respect it the thing is is i control my piece and i also take uh take into account everything that could possibly happen and then you know i may make my cut i'm going to point something out because it comes up once in a while with a table especially the table saws this is too big to show you but say i had a small strip of wood that was three quarters of an inch wide and i wanted to just nick it down a little bit further i'm not going to use my table saw for that okay it's just not going to happen it's too small it's too dicey it's a possibility that you were you know we could get hurt so what i'll do is either use a uh a hand saw and i'll even take a board and i'll clamp it to the side of my work table and take my little hand saw and run through it or take a planer if need be whatever it takes to cut it down but i won't use the table saw if a piece is too small and it looks to me like oh this is too dangerous it's putting my fingers too close to the blade i won't do it and over 50 years like i said i haven't been hurt i've enjoyed table saw i love them this is uh i can't even tell which one this is probably about the eighth or tenth table saw i've had in my lifetime this year i just finished course refurbishing this little guy and love it but i will be putting a riving knife on it even if i think i don't need one i'm going to put one on anyways because if it's going to help kick you know prevent kickback absolutely there's a little notch on the backside of these blades you've probably seen them show up these days and it has a little dip past the blade you'll see a little dip right there and uh let's close in on that a little bit so let's see if we have enough light for this and i think we do this little dip right back here behind the blade and it sort of rises up a little bit that actually helps to prevent kickback on these blades so that's something that's actually a good thing so if your blade has that that's a good thing if your blade doesn't have that you might want to consider going and finding a blade that has this little dip on the backside because that will help to prevent kickback like i said we re we all want to enjoy the hobby you know use the most common sense when we're using power tools especially this number one machine here that helps to you know hurt everybody and do as much as we possibly can to be safe with them the dark the dark side of it i hope we covered it a little bit for you so you can understand wow so there you have it the dark side was we were told 50 something years ago put the blade as high as you can or whatever you're most comfortable with in order to get the best possible cut and part of the reason was they had this theory at the time that the blade coming down this way on more of an angle would give you a better cut and also go through the board better whatever so it hasn't been talked about nobody seems to want to talk about it and i just thought guys i'm gonna you know i'm gonna give it to you no it's not safe but it was done in the past hey thank you for watching coffee and tools please like share and subscribe and hopefully we'll get into some more interesting things in the coming uh next coming few uh shows right all right anyways over and out [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Coffee and Tools

Views: 319,117

Keywords: Tools, reviews, wood working, 3D printing, projects, workshop tips, car repairs, RV repairs

Id: e8QuLZJM-rU

Length: 17min 16sec (1036 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 26 2021