When most people are cutting on their table saw, they are thinking about cuts that are parallel and straight. How in the heck would you cut something that look this, well the answer is with pattern cutting and it’s really easy to do on your table saw. So, lets you what’s involved.
The key to pattern cutting are two things. First of all, a pattern. This one, we have already made, we have got good square edges on it and the story behind this pattern is we also have got a little small bookcase that needs to fit in a house that sets to an obtuse angle. So, we are going to need several of these pieces to act as the floor, the ceiling and shelves of my cabinet. The second element of pattern cutting is a fence and this one just simply a piece of plywood screwed perpendicularly to another piece of plywood. We have got some holes cut in it so that we can clamp this whole unit to the fence. So, this is going to be a paint grade cabinet and for that reason, we don’t have to worry about keeping this surface up. Now, we can go ahead and patch that afterwards. To hold my pattern in place, we are going to screw the pattern to the work piece. If this were not a paint grade piece and we wouldn’t be able to fill this holes then we would use double sided tape.
Now, we will head back to the table saw. We are going to need to put my fence in place and simply just line it up and clamp it on. The next thing we want to do is we will align the edge of my fence to our blade. Set this square right against there and slide the fence over until it just touches. Blade height is higher than our work piece but lower, just slightly lower than our fence. It’s important for us to note the amount of cutoff that we have the amount of waste. If you start cutting a lot of material off on your pattern cutting with the table saw, you could end up causing the waste to bind in between the fence and the blade. That’s going to give you a dangerous kickback situation. So, if you really want to cut off minimal amounts and for this particular pattern, we think its narrow enough that we don’t have a safety issue, then we will just stop the saw in between each cut and remove the waste. But if it were any bigger than this, we would want to actually trim that waste off first with a jigsaw or a bandsaw. Now, we are going to put on some safety gear, safety glasses and my hearing protection. Then, we are ready to cut.
We need to maintain good firm downward pressure towards the fence. We don’t need to force this through the fence but we do need to keep enough pressure on the work piece that it stays tight up against that time. We will make a full pass, completely pass the blade, just like any other cut. Now, we are going to let the saw wind down. We want to make sure that the saw comes to a dead stop before we reach in there and remove the waste. One more pass on this work piece, the needle, the shape we need for our corner. Again focus on the blade until it comes to a dead stop before reaching in and removing the work piece cut off.
There we go, perfect copy on the next one and back to the table saw. We can repeat the procedure as many times as necessary to yield the quantity of parts we need to complete our cabinet. Stopping the saw and removing the waste each and every time for safety.
Now, we have three components that will make up the floor, the shelf and the ceiling of our cabinet. They are all exactly the same and all super simple to make.
Hopefully, the article helped you a lot to solve elevation travel limit issues for an industrial cabinet saw. You can check our best table saws 2020, it will definitely help you to find your next best table saws.