How to Use a Table Saw

Video Transcript

"I'm Jeremiah Fox. I'm a carpenter and handyman out here in New York City. A table saw is a very powerful tool that requires a lot of safety measures. First, you need your safety glasses to protect your eyes, and a table saw is noisy, so make sure to have your ear protection in. Now, a table saw is a saw built in to a table. It's basically a big spinning blade that can be raised and lowered to do your cutting. Now, all table saws come with safety features that we have taken off, it's called a saw guard, and it mounts back here and comes over and keeps you from bumping in to the saw blade. We've removed that for visibility for this demonstration. Now, besides the blade on the saw, they also have this thing, which is called an adjustable fence, and this is what the wood slide against as it's going through the blade. The fence slides back and forth in this groove that also has a measuring tape attached to it. And we have a little line here that you can line up the dimension that you want to cut the wood. So, for this demonstration, we're going to cut it to eight inches. Then we lock down the fence with this knob here. And now we're going to make a rip cut on a piece of plywood. You want to adjust the saw so that it's higher than the piece of wood you're cutting, and basically, you're going to slide this along the fence through your blade, and then take it off to the side. Now, if you're ripping a smaller dimension, say down in here, you don't want to get your hands that close to the blade, so you'd use a push stick to push on the wood, but for wider cuts, it's OK to have your hand here, as long as you stay three to four inches away from the blade. So it's going to get a little noisy now. So we've just done a rip cut on the table saw, and now I'm going to demonstrate a cross cut. Now, to cross cut on a table saw, you need to use the cross cut guide. Your table saw will have grooves in it, which the cross cut guide goes in to. So, you'll take your piece of plywood, and then make a mark where you want the cut to go. Then you line up the mark to the blade, then hold the plywood firmly in to the guide, and then you're going to fire it up, and cut the wood. And so that's the basics of how to use a table saw. Remember, even though this is one of the most useful tools you have, it's also a very dangerous tool, so always use safety precautions, and keep your mind on what you're doing."