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In this video I'm going to be talking to you about cross cutting wood and in this case I'm using an aftermarket
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miter gauge. This is quite a nice one. It's made by Craig and
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as with all miter gauges it engages with the miter slots here in the tabletop
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Most people are right-handed so we cross cut to the left of the blade. This slot is going to get a lot more use than
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this slot for that reason. This particular miter gauge has a length stop so you can make
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repetitive cuts all to the same length without having to measure and remeasure and everyone's going to be
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perfectly the same. I'm just going to go through the procedure here without running the saw and then I'm going to turn the saw on the dust collector and then we'll actually complete a cut
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Now in this case this particular miter gauge you can adjust the position of this piece. You don't have to do that very often
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but if you have a gauge like this or you get one you're going to want to be sure of two things. First of all
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you don't want to have this support so far over that it encounters the blade
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That kind of goes without saying you don't want to cut that. Less obvious though
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is that you don't want to have it clearing the blade but
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hitting the guard. So it's got to clear the guard. Pretty simple stuff
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With the depth stop or the length stop rather it's adjustable too
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You can move back and forth and it can flip up out of the way when you don't need it. When you flip down it stops the wood
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positively. So what I'm going to do here is imagine for a moment that the mark I want to cut to is aligned with the blade now
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Just for the pre-operational demonstration I'm going to move the wood over
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because the blade is not actually going to be spinning yet. So you put on your safety gear
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drop your guard and then with one hand on the wood and one hand on this handle you just
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push it through and completely clear the blade. Don't worry about the offcut. Don't touch that until the blade has come to a full stop
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One little caution here except in a very specific situation that I will show you about in another video
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you want the fence well and truly out of the way. You don't want the fence close
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because your offcut can get trapped between the blade and the fence and that can be virtually guaranteeing a kickback. So you don't want that
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So once again as with any kind of cutting on the table saw
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you want the blade to be not too high certainly not below the surface unless you're doing some special joinery work
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but maybe a quarter to a half inch above the workpiece surface
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So that's about it. I'm going to just take a little bit off this
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piece of wood. I'll start by turning on the dust collector My remote control happens to be broken at the moment
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but a remote control for a dust collector is a very handy thing because it's just a little
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belt fob and you press it and turn it on and off. I'll come back put on my safety gear
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fire up the saw and make the cut. Now with a with a cross cut like this you're not using a push stick because your hands are nowhere near the blade and essentially it's the miter gauge
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that does the pushing for you. So let's get started. So
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that's the cut. The blade has stopped. I can raise the guard and
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I've got my piece. I don't need a super smooth cut on this piece of wood, so I didn't use one of my super fine blades
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but that's it. That's the cross cut process in a nutshell. Now before I finish up though, I want to show you
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something on this miter gauge here. Of course miter gauges aren't just for straight cuts
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they're for angled cuts too and there's a pin to come out here. You take the pin out and you can
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rotate it and lock it to different angles. This one happens to have a vernier scale on it which allows you to very finely
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adjust the angle. You know in practice, I don't really find that useful
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You also are going to find that cross cutting on the table saw
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isn't done as frequently as it used to be and that's because we have chop saws now. They're very common, very accurate and
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they do a great job. So for fine cutting, especially at specific angles, I generally use my chop saw
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but there's nothing wrong with the miter gauge as well. Now as I said, this is an aftermarket miter gauge
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Over here I've got the miter gauge that came with this saw
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It didn't have the wood in it and that's one thing I want to mention. With a miter gauge face that's only this wide
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you don't have near the control over the workpiece as if you have more support
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So I just put this piece of wood on here. I also applied some
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self-sticking high friction tape of the kind you'd usually use on stairs or something like that to improve safety
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because you don't want that workpiece to move. You want it to stay there and this high friction surface really helps that
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This particular miter gauge has an adjustable depth stop for 90 degrees and the two 45s on either side and
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well, I guess that's essentially it. Happy cross cutting
