Ripping Small Stock | Paul Sellers - YouTube

I want to show you a couple of methods that I use at the workbench for sawing

and it's something that we commonly use sometimes you get small pieces of wood

and they're awkward to hold with your hands on a sawhorse

you can't get your knee on it on a sawhorse you get slippage and it affects

the safety that you feel you need and then there are questions of accuracy and

material waste those kinds of things really impact you when you're working I

want to show you how we would normally do it at the bench working with our

material and the advantage to these methods is that you have safety of your

work safety of materials you've got solidity and holding and that leads to

greater accuracy so the presentation of the saw is easy to manipulate when

you're working with it so to show you two ways I've got a rip saw here what

I'm going to do is I'm going to rip down this board one way this way I've set a

gauge here which is standard this has already been Trude and straight I want

to go down half the length of this board so I would typically because

I've squared this edge to this face I would run gauge lines here this has got

a saw kerf here that shouldn't be there but it'll still work and then I

come down half this way so I'm going to rip down here so that you can see the

method that I use I go in the vise this way it gives me very great solidity and

then I drop this down here just for the start of my saw I'm going to cut on this

waist side here so I start this saw just off my line about a millimeter away from

my line my thumb goes up against the side of the saw plate and I engage the

saw the full width just like this now I no longer have to think about whether

I'm square across the only thing I have to do now is in the first ten strokes I

need to determine the course of the saw so here I'm working

parallel to my line and I'll show you what I mean by parallel there's my line I'm

working down this line I'm working down on this side I can see I leave that

little bit on and I can use the hand plane then to true up the surface when

I'm done so now my main focus is just on ripping and rip cutting so I brought it

way up in the vise I put my hand here I pull against the wood to counter the

pressure from my hands from my sawing hand and then I saw down parallel to the line

just like this correct the saw as it goes

and that's how I would rip cut a piece of wood when it comes to thicker stock

here so I've just trimmed off some thin stock but if I wanted to cut through

thicker stock this is what I would do this is a different method so that's the

RIP cut for thin stock I want to take quarter of an inch off here so I've set

a gauged to quarter of an inch like this I go onto the end as well like this

now this might be that I want to split this board in two and use both sides if

that was the case I would run my gauge on this side as well like this and I would

run my saw in between and then I would plane down to the final width in this

case I'm just going to rip to one of the gauge lines like this so I've run my

gauge line watch what happens here I go into the vise with my piece of wood

perpendicular and I want to keep this piece of wood in its full width so I'm

taking out this midsection so I want to cut again on this side I'm going to cut

one to two millimeters on the waste wood so I've put my thumb against the side of

the saw here drop my plates the saw plate against the

wood and against the thumb and then I work across the piece of wood this is a

little aggressive here because we generally don't saw square across like

this once you're into the wood can you see my line here this

is my knife or gauge line here so I'm just a millimeter over so once I'm in I

don't have to worry this is where the saw is optimized once you've gone into

your material this way you can start just with every stroke drop your hand

keep dropping your hand like this and this is where the saw really works well

and this is where it works well when you're working on on two sawhorses too

check this side yeah I haven't really impacted this side at all this side I've

gone down two inches I flip over and I'm going to tell you what I do in a minute

and flip over drop my saw into the kerf again and I work down this the cut line

what I do is I make sure that I count ten strokes every time I go from here on

watch this now I'm going back in the cut because here I'm only down this far

and here I'm only down this far so I'm really square across inside the cut

basically now I come down here I'm going to count ten times one two three four

six seven eight nine ten and I'm staying on my line I flip over and I do the same

cutting on the waste side of line one two three four five six seven eight nine

ten can you see my cut line here is the

gauge line is fully engaged it's still on the good piece of wood

same on this side so now I go down this side and my plate now is governing a lot

of this direction which is wonderful ten I go down ten strokes flip over and you

can be legalistic nine or eleven strokes won't make much difference ten it's not

much trouble to do it this way this is a 22-pound saw and I've kept my line the

whole time because I can see the line it means it means that I have an excessive

wood that can be readily planed down and I'm only going to plane a milimeter

off this we are down way past half way now

I've run out of gauge line now because I wasn't planning on

going all the way

through let's cut this in two and look at the saw kerf and see what we ended up

with there you g o Phil just close in on that and see how

clean that pit is you see that is a very good cut that's as good as I would

normally expect on a bandsaw it's not much off from a table saw same on this

one nice clean cut if I took this and put this in the vise like this and take

my hand plane you'll see how little work this took to get this piece of wood to a

smooth finish perfectly adequate that's a great way to do it it's very

inexpensive and it means you get the body exercise and you get your wood

thickness and you don't have any issues it's very simple thank you for watching

this I hope you enjoyed it I did thank you

you