Table Saw Essentials Session #3: Thin Rips, Bevels, Cutting Metal

It can be really difficult to safely rip thin pieces on the table saw, because we wanna keep the guard in place. But when I bring the fence over and it starts to hit the guard on my saw at this point I'm still an inch away from the blade, and it's way bigger than I wanna make my cut at. So here's a very simple solution. We leave the guard on. You make this very simple shot made jig.

Here's what I've got. Piece of melamine and the field here could be made out of anything. It could be plywood, particle board, MDF. Rip that to a number that's easy for you to remember. And of course, I've written it on here as well.

This is an old safety push pad. The neoprene wore out on it. So I cut all that off, drilled a couple holes, mounted it. It makes that very easy to hold onto. And then at the back end, this is really where the money part of this jig is.

There's a little shoulder, there's a little hook. That's a piece of Mason Knight, piece of hardboard that I glued on, not nailed or stapled. And that creates a heel back here, at the end of the jig. Here's the way this works. If I wanna make one quarter inch pieces my fence is nicely calibrated.

So I set my fence at 10 and a quarter, put the jig against the fence, material against the jig. And as I start to move forward, that hook or shoe on the back end here is gonna catch my material, move it forward and allow me to make the skinny cut. Like any rip I'm doing. I'm gonna have my left hand maintain contact here, never go and pass the front of the insert. Pushing the material through using the handle on top of the jig, looking a little bit like this.

It's one of my favorite table saw jigs. I use it all the time. It's really a great way to make skinny pieces like this. Make them safely, accurately, and best of all with the guards still in place. There are a variety of things you're gonna do on your table saw that'll call for angling the blade or cutting angles on the miter gauge.

Now to be more specific with our jargon, if we angle the blade, that's called a bevel. If we angle a miter gauge, that's typically called an angle. For the blade, we've got a protractor on the saw. So when I turn the hand wheel on the side, the pointer on that protractor is going from angle to angle to angle and that's okay. But it really doesn't give me the accuracy that I wanna have.

So this is a problem that we're gonna solve by advising you to get an accessory. The accessory is a digital angle reader. We've got this sourced for you. This is a really, really accurate way to set up the blade. And it's also an accurate way to set up your miter gauge.

I'm gonna show you that little trick in just a bit. So here's how it works. Put it on the table. And normally it would be facing me, cause I'm the one running the saw. When it goes on the table it's got a magnetic base.

And then we can zero that out. That gives us zero. Now what's cool about this is even if your table saw was sitting at an angle because your floors aren't perfectly level in your shop. When I zero, it it's still gonna zero. If I hold it still enough, but when we changed the blade, the angle of the blade is relative to the zero point.

So it's a really cool setup. Okay. Then saw unplug, get the blade nice and high out of the saw. And now when this goes on the blade. And we change the angle, the digital readout will follow within tenths of an inch.

This will give us a very accurate way to bevel our saw over to an angle. And whether we're on that side or that side, it's just a function of the complimentary angles that are required in order to get the blade to the angle that we want. So this is a great way to do the blade. I'm gonna change what I'm doing here just a little bit and show you how we can use the same device to really accurately set angles on a miter gauge. Here's a really cool use of that digital angle gauge, that'll help you set your miter gauge really, really precisely.

Here's what we do, first step, let it magnet itself. I think that's a verb, down to the table and do your zeroing. Then, bring the miter gauge to the table. Now the digital angle gauge goes onto the bar of the miter gauge. And then as we make a change, here's what you've gotta think about.

That zero, think of that as 90 and as I do this, without hitting my table, I'm moving away from 90. So, if I wanna hit 30 degrees 30, or I'm sorry 90 minus 30, I'm pretty sure is 60, i can do that math in my head. I put a little tension on the knob, the lock knob, just to make it easier to fine tune here. Sneaking up on being right. Look at that.

So now we lock our miter gauge in at that setting. Perfect 30 degrees that we're set for. It's a great second use of these digital gauges to make sure that you know all the angles when you're working on your table saw. Very simple, I fastened a sacrificial fence under my miter gauge. In fact, it's the three inch piece that we ripped just a little while ago.

Got screws through the miter gauge into the fence. There almost always holds the miter gauge. That'll allow that. First official act gonna cut into it. Here's what is so cool about this.

What I know now, is exactly where the blade is relative to the miter gauge. What I made is a line of cut indicator. That's the curve, the slot and the fence. Here's the beauty of this. I've got a board, I took it to my project.

I held it in place and I put a mark on it indicating exactly where I need to cut it. So it's a perfect fit. The way I take advantage of this is I put that mark up against the curve. I just cut in the fence. See how I'm on the right side, my right side of the curve.

That's my registration point. That shows me where the cuts gonna happen. And allows me to cut those to a perfect length. Here's another benefit. I wanna cut a bunch of pieces, 15 inches long.

So I grab my handy-dandy ruler. Measure from the right side of the curve. 15 grab my stop block, clamp that to the fence, where it's kissing the end of my ruler. Do a test cut to make sure I hit that right. It's a very easy way to set that stop block to make sure it's accurately set.

Notice the stop block is up above the table. So I don't accumulate saw dust there, that prevents me from being accurate. So even with a standard miter gauge, this set up makes it really easy to do accurate cross-cuts here on your table saw. We're gonna go one step further. I'm gonna swap this miter gauge out for another.

So we can talk just a little bit about the benefits of aftermarket miter gauges. Aftermarket miter gauges. What's the deal? Well, this rolls into this whole cross-cut on the table saw thing. And the deal with an aftermarket miter gauge is it does offer some benefits for you.

One, is that if we look at the bar on an aftermarket miter gauge. They commonly have ways that you can expand the width of the bar to really customize its fit into the slot in the table. The benefit to that is, the tighter we get that fit, not to the point where it won't travel, but when we snug it up. Then we make the miter gauge more accurate, cause it's not bouncing around in that slot. So that's a nice benefit.

If you look at the head on an aftermarket miter gauge, they're really finely defined. So when I change angles on something like this, it makes it really easy to be finite. And even to hit just parts of an angle instead of just five degrees, five and a half degrees. So that's another benefit that we get to these aftermarkets, it's just more accuracy coming from the saw. And one of the things I wanna show you is cross-cutting big pieces.

So let's say this piece of melamine that I had out earlier, needs to be cut. We can't use the rip fence for this because we have that ruler we'd be breaking. And if I try to just use my miter gauge, the problem is that the board is wider than what will fit between the front of the miter gauge and the front of the blade. Well, we're gonna think outside the box a little bit here. And I take our miter gauge, flip it around, bring our material on this face of it and make the cut this way.

The thing to watch for here is left-hand on the miter gauge, right hand holding the material up against that face, so that it doesn't creep off. And it doesn't take a boat load of pressure. Your knuckles don't need to turn white here. But you do just need to make sure that we keep those tight to each other so that this doesn't have the opportunity to creep on you. This is one of my favorite little sneaky tricks on the table saw, because simply reverse on the miter gauge, let you cross-cut something a lot wider than using the miter gauge and its other positions.

So great thing to keep in mind. Great thing to remember when you need to cross-cut those big boards. One of the really cool things that you can do with your table saw is cut non-ferrous metals. I wanna be real specific about this non-ferrous we can cut aluminum, brass, copper thin wall stuff. Big key to this, having the right blade in the saw.

Have a look at the blade I've got here. And what you know about blades is gonna apply to this. We've talked about hook angle. We've talked about grind. This is a triple chip grind and it's a negative hook.

When you look at those teeth, notice that they're leaning back away from the cut. It's a very high tooth count. Got this blade sourced for you on the PDF. Once we've got the right blade in the saw, we can make this cut. What I'm looking at here, is a piece of aluminum angle iron.

One of the things I like to do, it's not imperative but I think we get a little better job out of it is back it up with a chunk of wood. So when I make this cut, the aluminum is gonna lead the cut. The cherry two by two is gonna trail it. And I'm gonna cut through both at the same time. What I like about the wood back here is it supports the exit side.

Helps eliminate some burring I might get over there. As far as cutting operation goes gonna treat this same way we would as if we were cutting a regular piece of wood. Now, qualifier, when I turn this on you're gonna see me take an extra step. This is a soft stop saw. So I do have to bypass the break in order to cut non-ferrous metal like I'm about to do here.

So let's get this set up and then I can show you the cut quality off of this and what a great job it does. It's really amazing how easily that cuts through the aluminum. Now let's have a look at that cut. Very smooth on the end and really that's the tiniest of burrs on the inside of that cut. So great thing to be aware of, something you might not have thought about doing with your table saw, but a great technique to be aware of.

Remember it all depends on having the right blade in here and we've got that sourced for you.