Bandsaw, Router Table, and Table Saw Safety

When I'm teaching woodworking. One of the things I talk about a lot is making sure that you're staying safe, while you're working in the shop. And part of what that comes down to is making sure that you can always be in control of your material. So it's not in control of you. And that's what I wanna look at here. So on my table saw, what I'm set up to do is to make drawer box pieces. These are already done. I've got rabbets cut at the end. I've got the grooves cut for the drawer bottom and it's grooving for the door bottom that I want to have a look at here because one of the things that I'm concerned with is making sure that my material stays securely against the fence. And I have good hold-down pressure. Now doing an operation like that only with your hands, is a really, really bad idea because if something goes wrong, your hands are next in line. You wanna make sure there's no contact at all between your hands and any cutting tools. So instead want to make sure that we have a hold-down device that's gonna do those things for us. That's gonna provide, hold-down pressure on the saw. And it's going to allow me to hold this against the fence, so that when I cut that groove it's nice and parallel to the edge all the way down. Making for a really good drawer apart for my project. So anytime you're using the dado head, on the table saw, we wanna make sure we have a push pad to hold that work down so that it can't flex away from the blade. And the push pad's gonna keep your hands away from the cut. While at the same time the push pad is doing a good job of holding your work against the fence, so that it can't wander as it goes through the cut. Lock miter joints, like this one, are a great way to put things together. and this is a really good example. This is a plywood column, but thanks to the lock miter joint, when you look at the outside of it, all you can see is the maple veneer. So it looks like the whole thing is solid maple. Now, the thing with lock miters is you do those joints here on the router table. You really want to make sure you're controlling the piece especially narrower pieces like this so that there's no opportunity for them to tip or rock as they're going past the lock miter bit. Otherwise of course, that'll affect the integrity of the joint. So this is pretty cool. I've got the height set correctly. I've got the fence located correctly and I'll show you how we make a lock miter with one pass in the horizontal position. One pass in the vertical position. It sure is cool, when you get that lock miter to snap together. Great mechanical integrity, great surface area for glue. And it really looks good on the outside because both pieces end in a miter. Now, part of what was happening there was we've got quite a bit of backward cutting pressure from that bit leaning on the material like it is. We're taking out a lot of wood at one pass. So in addition to a push pad, here to grip the material, having a hook on the back of your push pad is very beneficial. So you can counteract the cutting pressure of that cutter. If you're gonna work with rough-sawn lumber, you really want to start by face jointing the material before you do anything else. That way we're gonna get this nice and straight. Right now this piece is not flat at all on either face. So my first step in making that happen is a face joint operation. In order to do that, the last thing I want to see anybody do is control this with hand pressure. We're just too close to that joiner head. So instead, with the pads I can safely push this through again. Providing really, really good control of the workpiece. Once you start jointing, you want to do the complete cut in one fluid motion with no hesitation along the way. In addition to my pads, I wanna hook on my rear pad so that it engages on the end grain of the material. And like I said, once we start that cut that'll help us get one fluid motion throughout the cut. The proof is in the pudding. Look at the results we got on there. That's a beautiful piece of Walnut. Started out looking like that and we changed it to that. So in your shop in order to get good results and be safe, make sure that you always have good control over your workpiece. So that you're safely and effectively feeding it past any kind of cutter you're choosing to use.