Which Side Of The Line To Cut On, Plus Helpful Tips To Help You Cut Accurately

over the course of the last couple videos we've gone over marking and what that mark means and how to tell which side of the line to cut to and everything else but a few of you have reached out and said when I make the line to cut to I don't know if I should cut to the wayside of that line split the line in half or cut the line entirely now I think there's some instances where you should get rid of the line entirely I'll go over that later in the video the short answer to that and what I practice in my own shop is to cut to the waist side of the line up to that line and then you know that you at least have your intended mark cut too if you cut through the line at all like splitting and 1/2 or cutting the line entirely you're possibly cutting yourself short both figuratively and literally what's going on guys I'm Jody this is inspire woodcraft now I'm gonna give you guys some more tips and tricks and just food for thought and things that I do and what I've experienced and what I see happen in the woodshop that hopefully will give you guys some useful information and to start this out I'm actually going to take a series of marking tools that I have here on the table and I'm going to draw a 90-degree line with each one of those and we're going to see the difference between all of those lines and that's going to shed some light on how that relates to things here in the shop this may seem a little tedious but bear with me there are some points to be had here for this test I'm going to use a carpenter's pencil a fat number-two pencil a regular number-two pencil a point-9 mechanical 0.7 and then a gel type ballpoint pen so here's my carpenter's pencil here is my number two fat number two here is my regular number two here's my point nine here is my 0.7 and here is the gel ballpoint now this is the mark that each one of these could leave the only one that can't be varied is the ball point because the ball point is just darker but as you can see most of these lines are the same now I know there's a few of you at least that are sitting here going well that doesn't make sense because they're all different lead sizes and lead types in this is some sort of trick it really isn't this is actually to prove a point that it's going to become more and more relative as we go on here and that's the fact that you really need to know your tools yes pencils are tools I kind of got beat up a view few videos back because people swore up and down that all pencils are just pencils and if you quote-unquote upgrade to a different pencil and you need to work in a different trade and just all kinds of stuff and I know there's a lot of negative comments or sout there and that's fine but what I'm trying to show you guys is you need to learn the tools you have and you need to see what they can and can't do for you I know these tools very well and so I know based on the angle I hold the mat based on the pressure that I put on them I can ask all of those to do basically the same job that each one of them already can do now that being said I want to show you guys actually what typically is the mark that they normally leave again bear with me so here again we have a carpenter's pencil we have the fat number two we have regular number two the point nine the point seven in the gel ballpoint and again the gel ballpoint is not really going to have a lot of variants because you're kind of stuck with what you get on that however this is what the issue is that people are talking about as we go you can see that the mechanical pencil left a very fat mark where you come down to the point nine and the point seven and honestly even the ballpoint you have a much thinner line that's going to give you a greater degree of accuracy so when it comes to this line here do we cut to this side do we split that line in half or do we take that all the way now like I said I recommend cutting to the wayside and then you can always trim back if you need to but I think first before we look at that we need to take a look at the measuring tools that we're using to begin with because there's a lot to be said with those measuring tools so what I have here is a Stanley 25-foot construction type tape measure and I have the new my new go-to which is this Tajima 16 foot and what I want to do is sort of show you guys if I can get these to cooperate the difference between the actual markings and increments on them now we're not trying to see if the increments are the same between the two or simply looking at the lines that they have on here so as you can see with the Tajima we have much narrower lines now one could argue that this line even though it's narrower than this doesn't make a bit of a difference but again we're all doing different things and it depends on the level of accuracy we're looking for the inch marks and the half inch marks appear to be the same but the increments in between both on the thirty seconds and the sixteenth are much narrower than narrow or we get this line and the narrow or a marking tool the closer to an accurate mark we're going to be able to get now I also want to take a look at rulers because of course we use rulers a lot in our shop - and I would also like to note I'm going to talk about it a little bit later but a knife is going to be thinner than all of these things knife marks don't show up on video very well or at least very easily and so that's why I'm not breaking the knife out quite yet this is an old stanley rule out of a combo square that is long being gone from my shop and this is the steel roll out of an empire when i bring these together and again we're not looking to see if they match up we're only looking at these marks these marks are very wide this is really no different than one of these marks up here these marks are much finer this is related to these here and even one of these but a sharp one of these and so you can see as to how when we have this mark here where is the accuracy here before we can take this to the saw and cut it and wonder which side of the line we're supposed to go to how do we know which side of this line we're supposed to even mark - so again the thinner this line the better off you can get and this might not show up but I have a P EC rule and these increments while it might not show up are actually even finer than these ones so like I said the thinner we get this the thinning where we get our mark the more accurate we can be now we need to set ourselves up well to begin with now those are the view that our seasoned woodworkers know that you need boards that are squared edges you know that you need jointed edges and stuff like that what I see a lot of newcomers do new woodworkers in early di wires is not square up the ends of their construction grade lumber and fence boards before they pull their measurement so if you take a look at some of that material a lot of times the end is not very square so when you go to pull a measurement from you know you hook your tape to the end of that board at the edge closest to you and you mark out 12 inches if you were to mark that same 12 inches at the edge farthest away from you you would still get 12 inches but it's only copying what the end does and so your mark is going to end up in a different spot regardless it's a very good idea to try and square up that and first before you pull your measurement now of course after we mark that measurement we typically will square the line up you don't necessarily always need to square that line up especially if you're using a miter saw like I have in the background here now typically what I as people will pull their tape they'll make a mark at 11 inches whatever market is that they want they'll put everything down they'll pick up a square they'll try and line their square up to it like this and then they'll make a mark now I've been doing this for a while so I can usually hit my mark with this but it still allows for a degree of inaccuracy what I recommend instead is getting our intended mark then putting our pencil back down on this and sliding our ruler or our square back up to that and then drawing our mark that gives us an even better shot of actually hitting that mark let's take this one step farther what if we just leave our pencil in one spot make our line and then be done with it and that situation what I would say is let's say I need to mark this at 12 inches I hold my pencil to that 12 inch mark and while holding it there and I get rid of my tape slide my square up to it and draw my line now I have a perfect 12 inch mark right where I wanted it to go why because I didn't pick my pencil up and put it back down every time you do that you have a chance to land in a slightly different spot than what you did the first time now I said I recommend getting rid of the line altogether especially when it comes to cutting on a miter saw and this was the point - the whole pencil scenario in the beginning of the video you need to learn your tools I happen to know that with my saw setup the way that it is don't take that to mean that if you have the same saw that yours is going to be the same way because it's probably not my saws set up a certain way for me and how I work in my shop so if this interest you at all I challenge you to measure your saw with what I'm about to tell you my saw setup the way that it is from the back of the fence to where the blade first contacts the material is roughly three inches that being said if I go to make a mark on a board I'm gonna come roughly three inches from the farthest edge down and I'm gonna make my mark that means that when I get to this saw I can just simply pull the blade down until the teeth at the very bottom our slide slit right up to that mark then I can just make a mark I don't need a line to tell me where that mark is because I've already got the mark next to the Sawtooth so hopefully this will make more sense I know that it's roughly three inches so I know that down here is roughly three inches now I don't typically mark this and measure it out I just eyeball roughly three inches when I bring this over here I'm gonna make a mark right here let's say at 13 and 1/2 then I'm gonna take my blade I'm gonna bring it down until I get to my material and I'm just gonna scoot this over one way or another until I get right to the edge of that mark and I'm gonna cut that's gonna be my waist and now I know that this is right up to where my intended mark Wes now why do I say get rid of the line all the way together well because especially for new woodworkers this is really gonna screw you up because you haven't probably quite learned the benefit of having a jointed edge when you buy construction grade lumber fence boards stuff like that a lot of times the top edge can be very wavy or it can be boat it gonna have a crook in it and when you set that up into your saw and you chop down it even with an saw that's dialed in at 90 degrees when you pull that back out your mark isn't gonna look like it's 90 degrees anymore and that's because your reference point wasn't actually a joint edge to begin with so what's gonna happen is as you make that mark and go to cut it you're gonna realize that part of your mark is there and part of it isn't now you're wondering what you did wrong is your square knot square did you not mark it right or you're not holding the tool right when you did it is there something wrong with your pencil is your saw out of square and all of those things are probably not true it could be just the lumber that you were using so to save yourself a lot of frustration down the road don't even draw that square line it absolutely does nothing for you in the long run now something that doesn't get really talked about too much when we're making these cuts is what about when I want to take this piece and recess it into this piece somehow well typically what I would do is find out exactly where I want it and then I would draw a line but hopefully you guys can see there's a lot of gap between where my pencil is and where the material is so if I was to actually cut that part out and put this piece in it would be very sloppy and inaccurate therefore I would want to take something more like a finer pencil or a sharp pencil at least or a knife and get in here right here at the edge and now if this is gonna be my waste I can cut this out however I want to do that right up to the line saving the line and then slowly trim this back until I get an absolute perfect fit the same thing could work with a circle if I get my pencil or my knife or whatever it is right up to the base of that I know that this is my intended waste and because my pencil is on the outside of this piece of material I know that going up to the line is going to give me a perfect result and I can just slowly trim it back as need be until I get a perfect fit one thing that we all need to keep in mind is that there is many different forms of what people call woodworking and there's different amounts of accuracy that we all need or even see or desire and so the things that I've showed you today while a lot of them can be applied to a lot of different applications I'm not saying that it's necessary for you to do it this way it's merely food for thought now that being said if you want to get absolutely accurate the best thing you can do is to use some sort of a knife type system now I don't have a traditional knife in the shop what I use is my everyday carry knife this is the Avalon Forge I think I did a small video on it recently but I use this for everything and if I want this to be an absolute perfect score which again you guys probably can't see that that is the finest marking that I'm gonna be able to make so by using a knife and something with a very thin marking system I can put my knife edge right up to this hold my knife there just slide my ruler up to it and draw my my knife mark and now I know that that is perfectly absolutely as accurate as I'm ever going to be get it here in the shop other tools that you can use that do similar functions is like a marking gauge and even calipers because you can use the edges here to the points to scratch a mark along if you need to those are really great both of those tools for repeated accuracy I probably didn't cover everything that goes into this but hopefully I gave a lot of you guys some food for thought in your adventures going on down the road if I didn't clear something up or if I sort of misspoke you thought or something let me know in the comments I'll try and clear that up for you and if you have something beneficial to add that I may have missed please share with the community down in the comment section and we can all learn from it other than that thank you so much for watching this video guys as always I'll see you guys in the next one

Channel: Inspire Woodcraft

Views: 161,971

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Id: 3VDtFH5hwsU

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 10 2020