Archived from the Tools In Action forum (Woodworking). This thread is read-only.
Someone showed me this trick today and I can’t believe I haven’t seen it before. I thought it was brilliant.
He stapled a piece of Luan to MDF, he left it wider than the bottom of my circular saw. I pushed the saw against the MDF and cut the luan, now I have a track. Just put the edge of the luan on your marks, clamp and cut. So much quicker and easier than the clamp on edge guides.
how does this compare to your festool track saw?
The Festool that I use belongs to the shop I work at. I was working a different job today. The material was delivered and it was a far walk to where the table saw was located. For what I was doing I would say it was as accurate as the Festool. But with the Festool usually don’t bother clamping the track to the material and obviously I had no dust collection.
Does this trick mean I won’t be buying a track saw, absolutely not. I still see one in my future. But this is a great quick trick to use when you have a bunch of sheet goods to cut and don’t have a track saw around.
Way quicker and straighter than snapping a line and trying to make a straight cut.
These sorts of edge guides are fantastic for cutting short straight edges with a regular circular saw. I made one a few years ago and used the heck out of it.
There are a couple of downsides though that eventually convinced me I needed to buy a TS55. First off, the material I made it out of had to be pretty thin not to bind up on the motor of my 2731. However, with the longer lengths (around 48″ or so), it started to flex in the middle and no longer provided a true straight edge. The second problem was that I tended to hold the saw too tightly against the fence to keep to the line. This made the flexing problem worse so I’d loosen up and then it would lift up and start to track incorrectly. It was very stressful cutting up full sheets of plywood so I gave up and drank the green kool aid.
You’re a lot more experienced and probably don’t hold the saw with a death grip like I do, so you’ll be in much better shape I imagine.
Sweet jig, seems like it would work just fine for an edge guide.
I’m surprised you have never seen this before in all your fabrication. They are often called door boards. I have a 4ft section I use for breaking down plywood.
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we just need to invent a poor mans track saw with good dust collection and maybe tearout prevention if it doesn’t already have good tear out protection.