Popular Woodworking 2006-11 № 158, страница 59

With the faces surfaced and parallel, a stop at the jointer ensures a 90° edge in relation to those faces - even if you cleaned that edge at the beginning.

Push sticks can help guide your stock as well as hold it tight to the fence and table. They are invaluable tools in your shop.

When you get the second face surfaced nearly flat (it will not wiggle if placed on a tabletop) you need to begin to flip the board so that passes are taken from each face. This should be done while maintaining the appropriate orientation to the knives, meaning to keep cutting with the "fat-to-thin" technique. To accomplish this, the boards need to flip end over end after each pass.

The reason that this is so important is because as you remove material from your stock, you are exposing areas that have more moisture than the outermost surfaces of the rough boards. If you take more material from one face than the other, the board will tend to dry unevenly and is more apt to cup or warp. Run the pieces while incrementally adjusting the planer cut to the desired thickness.

Jointing an Edge (Again)

When the two faces of the board are flat and the board is the correct thickness, we need to return to the j ointer to run an edge. Wait a minute! Didn't we already do this before we cut the stock to rough sizes? You are correct, but that edge was run before we had the two faces parallel and flat. If you decide to use that edge, I can assure you that it will not be at 90° to either face of your board. Remember that it was created when the two faces were in the rough. That will cause problems in many areas.

If you decide to glue these pieces into a panel you will not get a tight, square glue j oint which could cause the panel to not be flat. If this is to be part of a door frame your mortise-and-tenon joint might be problematic.

To alleviate any of these scenarios, run the edge at the jointer now. This should be done while holding a face of the stock against the jointer fence and making a

pass over the knives in the same "fat to thin" grain-orientation technique. This guarantees that the edge is at 90° to both faces.

Cut to Finished Width

We now have our pieces at S3S and are ready for the next step in milling, which is at the table saw. Choosing a blade for this operation can be mind numbing. You can select a ripping blade that has 24 teeth or choose a combination blade that has 40, 50 - even 60 teeth. There are blades designed for plywood and melamine, and some blades are Teflon coated. You may decide to use a different blade for each material - but I don't.

I don't like to spend the time in my shop changing blades on my tools. If I am doing that I am not "making sawdust." I also don't use my table saw to crosscut very often.

I found that it's best to use a 50-tooth combination blade. It will produce a nice cut when ripping, can handle crosscutting if I choose, and will not have to be changed out for most jobs.

Once you have selected a blade, set the blade's height for ripping the stock. I bring the carbide teeth just above the thickness of my material. This allows the waste material to be cleared from the cut, helps keep the blade cool and lessens the chances of burning the stock as it is ripped.

Here is where you will find that the first step we took, cutting our pieces to slightly oversize, really helps. If you attempt to rip a wide board down the middle and it is not entirely stable, you can get movement that causes the stock to burn. This is less likely to happen with the pieces cut to just slightly over the final width.

That's because the amount of material on the off fall side of the blade will not have enough force in movement to bind the blade.

Hand Placement and Push Sticks

Some woodworkers are fine working around the blade while others can barely place their hands flat on the table. As your experience using the table saw grows you will become more comfortable with your hand placement, as well as with the width of boards that you will cut without using any push sticks. A common rule of thumb is that stock less than 6" wide requires a push stick.

Position your stock at the saw and let your left hand hold the piece at the edge and against the fence with light pressure. Use a push stick to guide the piece through the blade. As you move forward, allow your left hand to continue moving with the piece until you reach the edge of the table saw's throat plate. At that point, stop the forward progress of your left hand and allow the stock to slide on as it is cut.

One thing that is important to remember is to allow the push stick to completely pass the blade prior to releasing the push stick from the stock.

The last step in milling your lumber is to crosscut the piece to its final size. The accuracy of a miter saw is certainly a good bet. But if you have the 50-tooth blade, the table saw can be used quite effectively.

From the jointer, to the thickness planer, then back to the jointer and finish at the table saw. Milling wood with the grain orientation set correctly will help to improve your woodworking abilities and your projects. You will begin to wonder why your experience with the less-than-flat panels has disappeared and has been replaced with easy glue assemblies and more completed proj ects coming from your shop. You know the saying: "It's the little things that make the difference." PW

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Popular Woodworking November 2006