Basic woodworking

[cheeves]

OK so I been a Machinist most of my life, just bought a new Delta tablesaw for home improvement" noise reduction"..any body know of good sites for tips, tricks and or first aid.

Seriously, say you're ripping a 3/4 board, with a 36 combo blade, how far should the blade be proud of the board? does it have anything to do with gullet depth? Maybe I'm thinking to hard here but...

[cheeves]

Bump....

[Thermoform Guy]

Usaully, you will want your blade to be adjusted to about a 1/8 above the material you are cutting. This will help with safety and will provide a cleaner cut. When the blade is adjusted

higher than the full tooth of the blade above

the material it sometimes will leave score marks

or burn marks on the edge of the material.

You also might want to use a 60 tooth blade. This will provide a better finish with plywood,

especially with your cross cuts.

[#Rekd™]

Hi Cheeves,

 

When using the rip fence make sure it s at least parrellel to the blade or leading away a little on the exit side. When using the fence as a stop to cut stuff to length clamp a board on the fence to act as the stop in front of the blade then when the material passes through the blade it will not bind and shoot back at you.

 

Keep your hands as far as possible away from the blade and use pushers to push the material through the blade.

 

When changing the blade always un-plug the saw, this is a good idea if you have children as well (leave it un-pluged when not in use).

 

Yes get a better blade try a combination blade with 60 teeth.

 

You may want to upgrade the rip fence as well.

 

Good luck

 

John Ford

[k turk]

a bit late to chime in but i don't come to this part of the site often. in short you were generally on target with your gullet theory. a good general rule when ripping is to raise the blade so that approximately 2/3 of the gullet clears the top surface of the wood being ripped. this allows the saw dust to clear the cut and keep down heat build up. considerations for varying this rule would be density and thickness of the wood.

 

scoring and burn marks have nothing to do with blade height but are a factor of how well your saw is tuned up (ie runout on your arbor and your fence adjustment) and the condition (sharpness) and quality of the saw blade itself.

 

if you are serious about this, you should ditch the combination blade and get one high quality blade for ripping and one for crosscutting. a combo blade will perform both, but do neither exceptionally well.

 

a last comment on fence adjustment since john mentioned it. if you do some reading you will find two definitive camps on fence adjustment. one group claiming the fence should fall away slightly from the back side of the saw blade (general claim is 1/32") the other saying it should be parallel. i fairly strongly believe that the fall away camp developed from safety concerns and the general populations inability to truly dial in a fence dead square to the blade. as an experienced machinist you should not have this problem. one thing is for certain: you do not want the fence to toe into the back end of the blade. this will at best give you scored, poor quality cuts and sets up a dangerous situation for a kickback. if you do decide to tailoff the backside of your fence 0.01 is plenty.

 

also, a common and dangerous misuse of a fence is using it as a crosscut reference. again, a good general rule for this is if the length of reference surface touching the fence is shorter than the length of the material projecting out perpendicular from it, then you should use a miter gauge; or much better, build yourself a crosscut sled that rides in the miter gauge slots of the saw bed.

 

k

[cheeves]

Thanks for the replys ,

 

Biesemeyer fence, aligned like a machinist would, Kreg miter gauge, Freud blades 60 and 80 (been cutting Melamine) and countless hours, and new hardware to put this saw in tip top shape. Have ripped a couple poplar and pine boards..pretty sweet. So it's not really a saw issue at this point. I know if I scrap something out it's me...not the saw

[KCollins]

cheeves...check out thewoodwhisperer.com. Hes got a lot of great basic info that you'll find usefull. He just posted a new one on how to tune up a brand new table saw coincidently.