In continuing my efforts to try and get a process down for creating these raised panels, I ran two tests through my table saw again tonight. I first ran a scrap 2×4 through my dado blade to get a notch that cleared the blade. Then I clamped it down, perpendicular to the blade so that it could act as a guide for the boards.

I left the dado on for this the first test run, thinking that the wider cut might help - I wasn’t impressed. It was a bit difficult to run the board through, but I may have been a bit overzealous in trying to cut too much material out on my first pass.

I removed everything, including the dado, and put back my normal blade. I reset the guide and clamped it down.

This time I started off with a shallower cut and ran another test board through. I did a 2nd pass on all four sides after raising the blade a bit more and that seemed to give me decent results.

A little sanding on the slopes and these should look nice.  At the same though, I’m not too fond of the tension that seems to be on the blade when hitting it perpendicular like this. I’m hitting the blade on the back side and I’m wondering if I reverse the blade if it would make the cut a bit smoother - perhaps another test is in order…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 8:59 pm and is filed under Woodworking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.