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Saftey glasses or goggles are a must.Before any wood is ready to cut, make sure you have the essential safety gear for the job.
Safety glasses or goggles are a must. Goggles are the best, since they protect all the area around your eyes, but even the least expensive pair of safety glasses will do a very adequate job of keeping wood chips, particles and dust out of your eyes.
Wear long-sleeved shirts and pants when operating a table saw. Sometimes even during the safest operation, chunks of wood with sharp edges can get kicked back and hit your body. It is far better to have them tear open a shirt than to tear open bare skin.
Wear an inexpensive dust mask while using a table saw. For the most part when cutting wood, the dust thrown up into the air is basically organic in nature. However, treated wood, particle board and plywood are made with all different types of chemicals, glue and resins, none of which you really want to inhale into your lungs. -
A table saw bladeKeep in mind that any confrontation between your fingers and a spinning table saw blade is not going to come out in your favor. Always use a push stick or a push handle for feeding regular wood into the saw blade, and use wide rubber-soled push blocks for feeding sheets of wood to be cut.
Blade guards should always remain in place and never be dismantled prior to any type of wood cutting.
Blade height only needs to be high enough to cut the wood smoothly and completely through. Basically, set the blade so that the beginning curve of the cutting teeth--also called gullets--protrude slightly above the top of the wood. A blade set too high is another name for danger, and a blade set too low may burn the wood and not make a full and complete cut.
Always use the correct blade for the type of wood you are cutting. Although there are types called combination blades, the best cuts will be achieved by using specific blades for specific cutting tasks, like plywood blades, ripping blades and crosscut blades. -
Ripping a boardRip cuts are the easiest cuts to make on a table saw. Every table saw comes with a rip fence where the wood can be butted up to it and then fed into the saw blade.
Make sure the side of your board with the straight edge is butted up against the rip fence, otherwise the cut will be crooked.
As a general rule, boards less than 12 inches long should not be ripped on a table saw. Although it can be done, the danger from kickbacks and physical harm is greater then what this job is worth.
Long pieces of wood should be supported by some sort of outfeed table to keep the wood level along its entire length. Commercially made tables are made for this, but really, any small or portable table will work as long as it is the same height as the saw blade table.
Never reach over or around the blade to control the wood. Always use a push stick or push handle to do this while keeping your fingers away from the spinning blade. -
Ready to cross cutCrosscuts are accomplished by using the supplied miter gauge to assure a neat and clean cut.
A piece of sandpaper can be attached to a wooden block and secured to the front of the miter gauge. Sandpaper will give a secure hold to the piece pressed against it that needs to be cross cut, and this will prevent side-to-side slipping causing inaccurate cuts.
Never use a rip fence and a cross cut miter gauge together. The wood sandwiched between the rip fence and the blade during the cutting process is almost certainly going to kick back and possibly cause injury when it does so.
For repetitive cross cuts, try clamping a wood block to the rip fence to be used as a measuring guide. In this way, all you need do is butt the board against the guide, make the cut, and not only will the measurement be perfect every time, the waste piece will fall harmlessly away after cutting. -
Table saw miter gaugeMiter cuts are made using the miter gauge set at the exact angle of the cut.
Sandpaper over the miter gauge will greatly increase stability for all miter cuts. For longer pieces of wood, cut the piece down on that same angle to about 1/16 of an inch before your final cut line. This will increase stability, reduce the force of the blade cutting the wood, and allow you to make a much more precise miter cut. -
Bevel anglesBevel cuts are made by angling the blade to the exact angle of the cut, and these cuts can be made using either the rip fence or the miter gauge set at 90 degrees.
When using a rip fence, always make sure that the waste piece to be discarded is on the outside of the blade. Once the cut is done, turn off the saw and dispose of the waste piece.
When using the miter gauge for a bevel cut, there is a high chance that the piece of waste wood will kick back. This means, never stand directly behind the blade while doing this; make sure you stand off to the side and out of the way of any potential flying wood.
A bevel cut means that the saw blade is cutting through more wood because of the angle of the blade. Be prepared to feed the wood slower and grip the wood more firmly while doing so. -
A wobble dado bladeThere are two types of dado blades for table saws. One is called a wobble blade that literally wobbles back and forth at whatever width it is set. The other is called a stacked dado blade, which uses many blades stacked side by side to make the required width of the cut.
Dado cuts are grooves cut into the interior of the wood, cut to a certain depth so they don't go all the way through. They are useful as an anchor for shelving or joining the ends of wood pieces together perpendicularly on any inside surface.
Dado blades can also be used to cut rabbet joints, which are essentially dado grooves that extend to the end of the wood stock. These are useful to solidly join two pieces of wood together at the top or the bottom of the woodworking project.
For precise cuts using a dado blade, test cuts should first be done in scrap pieces of wood and then adjusted for the exact width to achieve a perfect cut in the project wood.
The real key to making good rabbets and dadoes is making sure the wood stays completely flat during the entire cutting process. Rubber-soled push blocks are ideal for this application, allowing you to press down on the wood while feeding it through the cutting blade at the same time.
