Was watching a prerecorded episode of Woodsmith tonight. The man was cutting deep 3/4" wide dados using a sled and the rip fence at the same time (the blade was 6" from the fence), in 3 passes.
Is kickback not a problem here because the height of the blade is less than the height of the wood, or is this a safety issue?
No, snug really has nothing to do with it, although snug is always a good idea. What makes kickback a virtual impossibility in the case is that there is no lose piece on the rip-fence side of the blade. Also, as another pointed out, there is no chance of binding on the forward side of the blade.
I was pointing out, in reference to using a sled, that since there is a fence on the sled to keep the "cut-off" side from backing away from the blade, there is no chance of it twisting between the blade and rip-fence which is a main cause of kickback.
In the case of cutting a dado on a table saw without a sled, it would be perfectly safe to do so with a miter gauge (with or without an extended miter fence). Again, there will be no cutoff piece to bind between the blase and rip-fence.
Two schools of thought here. One is that if you aren't cutting through the wood, you won't get kickback because the wood won't close in behind the blade. Which is true.
But you still have a possible source of kickback, which is that if your work somehow gets hung up against the fence, it can twist againt the blade and you can still get kickback. Not as likely, but still can happen. I wouldn't do the sled + fence move because there are other ways to get the job done.
Be careful with the suggestion that this is safe. Every thing has to be done correctly to prevent kick back.
If you pull the sled and work back through the blade and you let the work move at all a kick back is going to happen unless you continue to hold the work piece firmly in place. Kick back does not require a loose piece between the blade and fence, it merely requires for the blade to catch the wood and throw it back.
If anyone else has seen the episode, maybe we can offer opinions on the strategy used of making a mortise by cutting a dado into the edge of each of two pieces of wood and then glueing these edges together. Maybe one can argue that the glue is stronger than the wood, but my intuition tells me that one is inviting the glue joint to fail.
Special weekend projects, a Nantucket-style bench and a traditional wall shelf, are presented.
Episode: 507 Through Mortise & Tenon Projects Program Length: 26 Minutes 46 Seconds Educational Recording Rights: One-year rights for teachers to tape.
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