Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I never paid much attention to the insert that fits around the blade in my table saw until I tried to install a thick dado set of blades and they didn’t fit into the insert. You can pay $30-50 and buy new ones but yikes, that’s pricey for just the few cuts I wanted to make.

Instead, I pulled out a scrap piece of wood, cut out the exact shape of the opening, cut out a finger hole, drill some screw holes, routed the bottom to make it the right thickness and then mounted it into the table. I clamped a piece of wood over the insert to hold it down and then turned on the blade. I slowly raised the spinning blade up and it cut a perfectly sized hole in the insert. Booyah. Custom table saw insert for free!

You can find lots of great videos on YouTube showing you how to do this but I particularly liked the one from Frank Howarth.

YouTube is an incredible resource for learning a new hobby (or expanding the horizons of your current hobby.) Case in point: Matt Cremona. He doesn’t just go to the lumber yard to buy wood for his projects. He walks through the woods, cuts down a tree, slabs it with a chainsaw mill, lets it dry and then takes it into his shop to finish milling it for a project. While this isn’t something that I’ll probably ever get to do, it’s really fun to see how it works. Check out this video demonstrating his chainsaw mill:

A wood shop can be a dangerous place. There are blades spinning and cutting all over the place. One key part of staying safe is knowing what can be dangerous. A 2011 study from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System lists these as the top injuries:

1. Table Saw: 39,750 annual injuries
2. Jointers, planers, shapers, and sanders: 10,930 annual injuries
3. Miter Saw: 6800 annual injuries
4. Band Saw: 3550 annual injuries
5. Radial Arm Saw: 350 annual injuries

Now obviously these numbers are a bit skewed by which tools people use the most often. For example, the radial arm saw isn’t very popular anymore as people are using table saws with sleds for many of the same purposes.

Whenever I get a new tool, I like to do a bit of reading about common injuries and tips for staying safe. One thing I learned with this new sliding miter saw is that after making the cut, you should let the blade stop spinning before lifting it out of the wood. Otherwise you run the risk the cutoff piece catching the blade and flying around the room. It can also give you a cleaner cut since the spinning teeth only touch the wood once.

It’s also important to keep the wood clamped down when possible. When the blade in a miter saw goes through the wood, it pulls up on the back side. It’s not uncommon for it to catch on the wood and rip it up in the air. If the wood isn’t firmly held in place, this can be pretty bad news.

As someone who makes money with his fingers, these kinds of tips are extra important!

One challenge with woodworking projects is figuring how to make the best use of the wood you have available. If you’re working with expensive wood, your decisions can have a dramatic impact on the total cost of your project. I did some quick searching around and found a few solutions, but my favorite (free) one so far is the Free Online Panel Cut Optimizer.

For the Adirondack chair project, I thought it took two 2″x6″x8′ boards and four 2″x8″x8′ boards. Using this tool, I got it down to three 2″x6″x8′ and two 2″x8″x8′. That drops the price by about 20-25%!

The downside is that the cuts aren’t as simple to make. The way I had it originally drawn, I cross cut the wood and then ripped it to the right width. This more efficient use of the wood requires more strategic cuts, but if it saves enough money, it’s worth the effort.

Back in November of 2006, I got my first miter saw. DougS found it at a garage sale for me. It was a 10″ Delta and it served me very well, especially considering that I only paid a few bucks for it. Aside from the fact that I needed to sharpen the blade, the only thing that really bugged me about it was the small size. I couldn’t cut through a 4×4 or a 2×8. I use 2×8’s a lot in my projects so that means making a cut, flipping it over, cutting again, and then going over to the table saw with the cross cut sled to get a clean cut. That’s three cuts where I should have one. After months of hemming and hawing, I finally pulled the trigger on a new saw: the Ridgid 10″ sliding double bevel miter saw.

My search originally started with 12″ sliding saws and for a long time, I was saving up for the DeWalt. More recently, I gave the 12″ Ridgid a serious look and was very impressed, especially considering that it was $200 less. The drawback was the size. 12″ sliding miter saws are huge and the Ridgid was significantly bigger than the DeWalt.

Looking around at various reviews, lots of wood magazines targeted at the amateur and semi-pro woodworker did 10″ sliding miter saw reviews. Why were 12″ reviews so hard to find? I ran across one article which talked about the advantages of the 10″: lighter, smaller size, and the blades are a little cheaper. And it turns out that unless you’re doing big crown molding, you probably won’t care too much about the difference in capacity. For example, when cutting at a 90 degree angle, both the 10″ and 12″ can cut 4x4s and 2x12s. At a 45 degree miter cut, the 12″ can cut a little more (2×10 vs 2×8), but that’s about the only major difference in the cutting specs. The smaller size seemed like a positive tradeoff.

I would have jumped on the 10″ at that point, especially since it won a lot of those woodworking magazine shootouts, but it was exactly the same price as the 12″. Huh!? It took me a while to weed through the specs but I finally figured out that the 10″ has a few extra features compared to the 12″. There is a laser system that people say is actually somewhat useful, an LED light that illuminates your cutting area, and most importantly for me, a soft start system. On my old saw, I’d hit the button to turn on the blade and the instant 100% power surge would often jerk the saw around a bit and the wood would move. The soft start system spins up the blade a bit more slowly so it’s a very smooth operation.

I haven’t done a lot of serious work with this yet, but so far I’m in heaven. I was tempted to wait for this saw to go on sale (it was a Black Friday deal in the past), but eventually I decided that I wanted to be done researching and I wanted to start using it. Now that I have it, I wish I had bought it a long time ago!