How to cut
1mm Wood
Cutting Thin Strips on Your Tablesaw - WOOD magazine
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an issue 208 of wood magazine we feature
this little keepsake box that required
us to cut a series of thin strips each
1/16 inch thicker than the previous one
now to safely cut thin strips you need
to take into account a few extra setup
and safety requirements you can't just
drop your table saw at 1/16 inch and
expect to cut those strips safely you'll
get some explosive kickback there I'm
going to show you two methods to safely
rip thin strips in this case just 1/16
of an inch then I'll show you how we
take a stack up sixteenth inch strips
and use them to make the progressively
wider cuts used in our keepsake box
first thing we're going to do is create
a set of sixteenth inch thin strip
gauges and we're going to cut those all
off of this one board and the way we do
that is we set our fence to a known size
in this case we're going to use about
two and a half inches and you want to
get dial this in as accurately as you
can get it right on the right on the
needle there
you
and then the next step is we're going to
bump this over to slice a sixteenth inch
strip off of the off cut side here and
so to do that we bump it over a
sixteenth plus the kerf of our blade and
because I'm using a full kerf eight inch
blade we're going to bump this over 3/16
there you have a sixteenth inch strip
and we can check this the accuracy of
this if you want and that's pretty close
if you need to make adjustments go ahead
and try again you got plenty of board
here and then the next step is to just
cross cut this up into smaller strips in
our case for our incremented pattern we
need eight
okay now I've ripped my sixteenth inch
strip into eight different gauges and we
know they are pretty accurate because a
stack of them is coming out to 0.5 now
to set up to rip the thin strips we're
going to
lower our blade move our fence onto the
left side
raise our blade back up just so and then
we're going to take our thin strips and
a stop block and use these to set our
fans now if we just wanted to repeatedly
rip say sixteenth inch strips we'd use
one of our strips bring the stop block
up to it get it tight but not so tight
that it flexes the blade and one a
little little play in there
okay and then we're going to pull the
stop block back behind the blade so
we're not getting our heart pinched
and then we're going to tape that in
place against the fence
now we're going to move our fence back
into place
and simply
position that against the fence and
against the stop block here
and there's 1/16 inch strip and then you
just simply repeat that process blank
against the stop block fence against the
blank and make as many sixteenth inch
strips as you need
now if you want to do the progressively
larger thin strips increasing in size by
1/16 each time the wind gay as it goes
this way the maple as it goes this way
that's where you can use all eight of
your thin gauges I'll show you how to do
that okay once again we're going to
start with the fence on the left side of
the blade we are going to sandwich this
time we're going to sandwich all eight
strips between the blade and the stop
block make sure the teeth are engaged
with those and then slide the fence
against that and get it snug but not so
snug with the blade flexes like so
again we're going to tape that stop
block down move our fence to the
opposite side and this time we're going
to take our blank our gauges eliminate
one so you have seven sandwich those
between the blank and the stop block and
then move your fence up to that so
that's snug and remove your gauge blocks
and now your fence is set pick out a 16
inch strip
for your next cut you use only six six
of the gauges
and now you're set up for an eight inch
cut five for 3/16 inch cut
four strips for a quarter-inch cut three
strips pinched cut or a 5/16 inch cut
two strips for a three-eighths inch cut
one strip for a 7/16 inch cut and
finally zero strips for a half-inch cut
and to do the Maples strips you just
repeat the process from the beginning
and there you have thin strips cut
safely on the table saw and our blank is
ready for a glue up
