Using a Chop Saw

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Kevin and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you a little bit about the chop saw or the sliding cross cut saw as it?s called. We have our piece of material here that both faces are parallel to one another, edges as well. Now we're going to trim out both the ends so that we're square to where we're parallel end to end and also perpendicular to all the sides and faces. What we've got here is the saw and we've laid down a sheet of plywood and a piece of MDF here as backer so that when this machine is making the cross cut, its backed up along the board so that there's a lot less tear-out if any on this board. This is something really simple that you can do with your chop saw and just lay a piece of plywood down, put in a couple screws and same thing back here and hold them in place. It makes for a very nice clean cut. A lot of these saws also come with an extra light here and a laser so that you can line up your cut, but normally you can just go off of if you've got the backer stuff, you can go off of where the slots are cut with the saw blade and as you can see, on this saw, we're doing cross cuts so it has a lot more teeth and is going to do a lot finer cut and give us a lot less tear out which on a cross cut is where you get a lot of tear-outs. Unlike the rip blade on the table saw with fewer teeth for hogging out a lot of material, this is meant for doing a lot finer, neater cut and that's exactly what you need on a cross grain cut like this. When you use this saw, it?s very important to also remember as with machines, you want to use hearing, eye and respiratory protection when you use this machine. Alright, now that we're done with the chop saw, we've got both of the ends cut and so now we're square and perpendicular and parallel on all sides of the boards. It?s always a good thing to double check with a square; make sure you're cutting right. We're square there. Perfectly square there. So now, at this point, you're ready to take this board and do absolutely anything you need with it, whether its gluing it up to another board, cutting it into smaller pieces, cutting jointery, this board is now ready to be selected as to whatever you need it for and is ready for any operation that you might have. And as the fundamental essential of what you want to do when working with solid wood is make sure its square and perpendicular and parallel to all faces and that will be the first step in making sure that your jointery turns out nice and clean and that your glue ups are nice and clean and even, square and flat because along the way, if things get out of adjustment as much as a sixty-forth for instance, over time that sixty-forth is going to add up and add up and towards the end of your project, you're really going to start having problems. So in this early stage, you really want to make sure that you take the time to make sure everything is good and square and parallel, that your machines are working and cutting properly and that you're getting a good, clean result like this which is going to pay off in the long run for sure.

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