Ripping Short Stock Safely

One place where miniaturists have to deal with a safety issue is when cutting short pieces of stock on a table saw.  Most woodworkers cringe at the notion of rip-cutting short pieces and yet we miniaturists want to do this regularly.

Why is this a problem?  Ripping short stock is dangerous due to potential for kickback.  Ripping narrow strips is dangerous for the same reason.  It’s what we do, though, so how can we do it safely?

When ripping short boards on my full-size table saw I use this amazing tool, the MicroJig Grrr-riipper.  This is simply the best solution to working narrow, short strips on a table saw, whether your saw is a big 10″, 3hp saw or a smaller 4″ saw like the Proxxon.  I also use one of their splitters, owning one for full kerf blades and another for narrow kerf blades.

This tool has many virtues and the best way to learn about them is to visit the Micro Jig web pages that show you the Grr-ripper in action. Note, however, that

1) Your hand is not only not near the blade, there’s a bunch of Grr-ripper between hand and blade.

2) The wood is held down to the table on both sides of the blade and the jig has an adjustable pad to permit a lot of different cut widths.

3) The jig is steadied by a flat plate that runs along the fence and by a large flat pad that runs along the table surface.  The later also serves as a hook to assist in pushing the wood through the saw.

4) Depth is fully adjustable allowing you to cut very thin wood or very thick boards.

5) The pads that hold the board to the table have rubber surfaces so the Grr-ripper really lives up to its name.

I believe the street price on this tool is about $60.  A single kickback can cause you enough damage to spend a bunch of time with doctors and nurses so $60 is a pretty cheap medical avoidance strategy, don’t you think?

Oh, and while you’re at it, if your saw doesn’t have a useful splitter, take a look at the MicroJig Splitter while you’re at their website.

I own and use them for both my standard and narrow-kerf blades.  What I really like about them is that you can adjust the distance between splitter and fence to match the blade being used AND, it is easy to remove for doing cuts where a splitter won’t work (eg – dado and rabbet cuts).  The one downside is that the pins that hold it in place wear out and so you have to replace it once in a while.  Its low price makes this a small price to pay for the convenience and safety this splitter provides.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com

Two Cents on Common Sense

This week is Internet Woodworkers Safety Week.  If you wander the various woodworking blogs and websites you’ll find a bunch of very good advice on how to stay safe while working with the machines that are so much a part of modern woodworking.

Some might suggest that the best safety advice is not to use them.  While those woodworkers who work only with handtools may cut their finger occasionally, they slap a band-aid on it and go back to work and have no fear of losing digits or worse.

The truth of the matter, however, is that all of the advice on how to do safe woodworking is useless if you don’t also bring into your shop a healthy dose of common sense.  It used to be that by the time you became an adult you had acquired a considerable amount of common sense and this helped adults navigate their way through life.  More and more, however, I’ve come to believe that something has changed.

Surf through the woodworking forums and you’ll see that a lack of common sense is the basis of many accidents.  You find people saying things like “I had a kickback occur last night because my table saw fence isn’t aligned with the blade.”  The other day, in one of the carving forums a guy said, “I don’t see much value in a carving glove.  I don’t cut myself very often.”  Sometimes accidents aren’t accidents at all.  They are the result of people without common sense being trusted with sharp objects.   Common sense would dictate that you don’t use a table saw whose fence isn’t lined up with the blade.  Arguing against a safety glove while admitting that you’re cutting yourself sometimes demonstrates the same lack of common sense.   Without common sense, you will hurt yourself if you go through life, whether it is in your shop, in your kitchen, or while driving your car while text messaging.

If the guy pictured below falls and breaks his neck, would it be an accident?  I don’t think so.

So maybe the best safety advice is to think about what you’re doing, what could go wrong, and what would happen if it did?  Use common sense.  Realize that while true accidents can occur, many accidents are not accidents at all but rather a result of a lack of care – a lack of thought.  It might help to put this sign on the machines in your shop.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com

Cutting Up Safely

Wow, thanks everyone for the kind responses regarding my foray into the carving world.  I really enjoyed doing that little dog.  So much so, in fact, that I’ve done little else with my spare time but carving ever since.  I’m really bad at it but that’s ok as it’s REALLY fun.

I’m writing again on the subject, however, because 3 of the emails I got that said, in one form or another, that they’d given up carving because they cut themselves.  That’s a shame. While it’s true of pretty much everything in woodworking that there is a chance of hurting yourself, there are also ways to minimize the risk.  We don’t stop preparing food for dinner because we might cut ourselves while dicing an onion and we shouldn’t decide what we do/don’t like in woodworking that way either.

I’m a bit reluctant to “teach” much about woodcarving as I’m out of my depth in the woodcarving soup myself.  But thus far I’ve successfully kept my head above water and my blood inside.  I haven’t cut myself because of good advice given me by some seasoned woodcarvers.  I thought I’d pass that along.

The first line of defense is protection.  Woodcarving does require a very sharp blade.  If the blade isn’t sharp you REALLY have a danger problem as you have to pressure the blade too much to get it to cut.  That blade isn’t far from your hands and so covering the vulnerable parts is a good idea.

Guard the Thumb

There are only 3-4 different kinds of cuts in woodcarving.  One of those is a “paring cut”, which is the same as what you do when you peel an apple.  This means the blade is being pulled towards the thumb.  This is the best reason I can think of for covering up your thumb so it doesn’t get cut.   You can buy leather thumb guards but I use vet tape.  This stuff is available from woodworking/carving stores as well.

The neat thing about it is that it only sticks to itself (so that it doesn’t stick tightly to cat and dog hair).  So, you just wrap a bunch of it around your thumb and you’ve got a custom-fit thumb guard that can be pulled off/on and it can be used repeatedly.

The Holding Hand

The other potential place that a misbehaving knife can end up is in the hand you use to hold the wood.  You want to cover that hand with a glove.  The glove needs to repel cuts while also providing a good grip.  Most people use kevlar woodcarver gloves.  These only cost a few bucks and they’re well worth it.   They won’t prevent you from impaling your hand if you get wild (best advice is not to do that) but these gloves will prevent more typical nicks and cuts.

Cut properly

This is at least as important than protection.  The two basic cuts used to remove wood are the “push cut” (you push the blade with the thumb of your holding hand), and the “paring cut” (like peeling an apple).  I won’t begin to teach anyone how to do these properly except to say that these are both very controlled cuts.  Both cuts move the blade short distances and one controls that distance by the small movements of your thumb and wrist that provide the movement.  If you fine yourself doing ‘whittle a stick’ movements, with large knife movements and the blade skating off the end of the wood, STOP.  Just don’t do it.

To see how these strokes should be done, visit Gene Messer’s YouTube videos.  Specifically, watch his first video, titled “Carving Review for Beginners Part 2.“  Gene has a lot of great tutorials where he shows you how to carve various figures but this particular review video shows you the basic cuts used in all his carving.

This is lots of fun and with a bit of prudence, a bit of protective gear, and proper technique, you can enjoy it while retaining all of your fingers.  I’ll end by showing the second and third carvings I’ve done.  They’re simple and most certainly suffer from my lack of experience but they were fun to carve.