Wednesday, May 12th, 2010
Hey everybody it’s Rick Waters for the Splintered Board Podcast. This 3rd annual Wood Workers’ Safety Week was organized by the ubiquitous Marc ‘The Wood Whisperer’ Spagnuolo.
In this episode I want to demonstrate something that MicroJig sent me last Fall. It’s their safety tool called the GRR-Ripper. I think the GRR-Ripper is one of the most safety-centric tools on the market today. Now everybody has push sticks or push blocks, but the GRR-Ripper protects your hands and give you a place to guard your fingers just by holding something that grabs your stock and pushes it through your tablesaw, jointer or router table. So in this safety video I’m going to be demonstrating a little bit on the use of the GRR-Ripper, but also, I wanna do a little bit of Where’s Waldo. I want you to be able to identify all of the safety hazards that you see in the different clips of me cutting the stock for a project that I’ll be doing this summer.
So here I’m frozen on a picture of the face of the GRR-Ripper and I’m showing you that because I want you to be able to see that there are 2 channels and 3 legs. What you see is the leg on the left which will grab the stock and provide balance for the tool; a leg in the middle which will stabilize the GRR-Ripper, and also grab the stock; finall the leg on the right serves as a thin wall that is attached to a handheld outside fence that also provides stabilization because it rides on the top of the table saw bed.
So, the reason you have these channels is so that the table saw blade itself can pass between two of the legs. If that’s confusing, it gets easier to understand when you see it in action. So, let’s go ahead and take a look at how this works.
OK, so hopefully you can see from this little demonstration that from my actions, I’m acting like I kind of don’t really know what I’m about to do, but I really want to cut something. So I turn on the table saw, I get the wood in place, but I don’t know where to put my hands… So, indecision is what I’m trying to show is a very unsafe thing to have around spinning or rotating blades. If you don’t have a plan ahead of time on what you are going to do with a tool, Stop, Turn the tool off, Sit down and come up with a clear plan. Come back to the tool and Execute. Never turn on a tool without clearly knowing what you are going to do.
OK, here’s another. You can see that the stock is giving me some trouble moving across the bed of the table saw. There are 2 really good reasons for that: The wood is a little damp – it’s been sitting in the garage after a particularly humid few days; Also, the table saw bed is not lubricated well – it hasn’t been used in months and is dry as a bone with dirt and debris all over it. Clear off your tablesaw top and lubricate it, hopefully with wax. The next segment will show that the table saw top is waxed and the stock glides very well. I just want you to know that the GRR-Rippers have nothing to do with this inability to move the stock, they are definitely doing their jobs as best they can.
Hopefully you noticed that when I first put the stock on the table, that it wasn’t being supported behind me. You’ll see that again at the end of the clip because it won’t be supported on the outfeed side either. Both of these are safety problems for heavy boards (which these are).
OK, here you see me forcing the board, just pouncing on it to get it moving. This is NEVER a good thing, please don’t ever do this. Even if you do have GRR-Rippers, what if the board suddenly gave way and as you pounced on it it flew forward? If you didn’t have very sure fotting, your arm or even your chest could land on the spinning blade. Never pounce on a board to get it to move. If anything, turn the tablesaw off, take off the stock, and lubricate the bed of the saw.
At least with this clip and the entire video, I have a couple of good things going for me: I’m wearing hearing protection and the dust collector is going.
The last criticism I have for this clip is something very basic to the procedures of using a table saw, and that is to push your stock completely free of the blade before turning it off. This is a habit that I’m trying to break, but haven’t completely gotten rid of yet.
One of the great elements of the Micro Jig GRR-Ripper is that you can adjust the position of the handle. They did this (I assume) because your center of balance should mainly be centered over the table saw blade itself. This makes moving the stock much easier too – and here I demonstrate that. All it takes is a few seconds, a short twist of a philips head screw driver and the handle slides very easily. Another twist and the handle is locked down.
See how much of a difference a waxed table saw table can make?
Here I’m visually check to make sure that the table saw blade is going to pass through one of the channels of the GRR-Ripper. The table saw blade should not be digging into the GRR-Ripper. This isn’t a problem if it does – some people do it on purpose. The components of the GRR-Ripper are replaceable, so there’s no problem there, but for my intentions, there’s no reason to damage the tool.
Has anybody pointed out the fact that I’m not wearing safety glasses yet?
Now that was quick, did you miss it? I locked down the fence again just to make sure that it wouldn’t move while I was cutting and pushing against it with the stock. This is very important, I posted something on it last year that my fence’s locking mechanism is loose and will mess up my cuts if I don’t put a lot of weight on it when I lock it down. Those people who say you can’t make a curved cut on a table saw have never used a table saw with a loose fence.
Now, if you’re about to point out that I vary the speed at which I rip, there’s actually a good reason for that. I was trying to determine the best speed to feed Lyptus into the saw to avoid burning. It turns out you have to go pretty slow to burn Lyptus.
Right there, did you catch that? As I was putting down one of the off cuts, I got a couple of big splinters. One of the dangers of using a dull blade, which this is, is that the cuts aren’t the cleanest and you have to be careful with handling all of the stock.
Learning from my mistakes, I’m double checking to make sure that the board was seated fully up against the fence and that the GRR-Ripper’s channel will go fully over the blade.
It was pretty quick, but did you catch that? I pulled up my sleeves once again to make sure that they didn’t get caught in the blade. I just published a safety podcast on that, so if you haven’t seen the dangers of getting your sleeve caught in a table saw blade, check it out.
No what just happened there was that the wax on the table saw bed has worn away. What I acutally need to do is put down a nice spray lubricant for the table, but when I was shooting this I was counting on the wax holding out for the entire video. The jumping of the stock actually serves to proved the point that pouncing on a board to get it to go through the blade is a bad bad idea.
What am I doing here? I’m checking the GRR-Rippers to see if they actually did hit the table saw blade. It turns out that when I was removing one of the GRR-Rippers from a board at the end of a cut, I twisted the GRR-Ripper instead of lifting it off. That resulted in a minor cut taken out of the bottom of the green foam material that grabs the stock. So, remember that whether you use a push block or push stick, or even a GRR-Ripper – which I very highly suggest – keep it fully engaged with your stock and lift it straight off and back as opposed to twisting it.
Here I’m just showing off a little bit. I wanted to show everyone what figured Liptus looks like once it’s been planed, and before it has been card scraped. This stuff is extraordinary! I couldn’t believe the flame figure on these boards. I have 7 or 8 of them and only 2 didn’t have any figure at all. Stay tuned this summer so you can watch me turn these boards into another X-Leg Table.
So that’s it everybody! Please stay safe working wood this year, and I hope to be talking to you all again real soon!
Tags: grr-ripper, Micro Jig, Safety, Tools, wood, Woodworker, Woodworking
Posted in Garage, Podcast, Safety, Tools, Woodworking | 1 Comment »
Monday, May 4th, 2009
I just wanted to update you with everything that I’ve been doing for the last 7 weeks. Stay tuned for a couple of Woodworkers Safety Week episodes.
Posted in Furniture, Garage, Hobbies, Podcast, Safety, Tools, Woodworking | No Comments »
Friday, March 13th, 2009
I just got a new/old Hollow Chisel Mortiser.
I thought I’d share that with you all!
Posted in Furniture, Garage, Hobbies, Podcast, Tools, Woodworking | 1 Comment »
Sunday, November 30th, 2008
Baby Update, and Some Woodworking Too
We spent Thanksgiving in the hospital waiting to see if they were going to deliver the baby. It didn’t happen, but they did manage to ruin our holiday for nothing…
Take a look at this wooden, laser-cut business card!
Music in this episode by Rubberband Banjo.
Posted in Furniture, Garage, Hobbies, Tools, Woodworking | No Comments »
Sunday, September 21st, 2008
Fox Valley Woodworking Club Meeting
I had another woodworking club meeting last week. This one’s content may not have been as exciting for me as the previous one, but I did get some very valuable time with the club’s vice president. The club president is out of the country, on business, but the VP and I agreed to sit down with the pres. when he’s back, to discuss ways to get the younger generation more involved in the hobby/craft.
What I Learned This Week
Something that may be obvious to some, others may have learned it simply by occurrence, but I really didn’t expect this to happen. What I found was that wood residue stays on blades. Like I said, it may have been obvious… Walnut and Purpleheart getting ’smeared’ on the faces of maple boards.
What am I reading now?
Box by Box by Popular Woodworking. I picked it up last night and am already getting some great ideas.
Bridge City Toolworks CT15 Stainless Steel bevel angle tool for the small price of $289! Compare that to the bevel angle tool I almost picked up at Woodcraft last night for $16.99.
Local (to me) woodworker’s blog ‘Spackle & Sawdust’ by Patrick Jaromin: At least he’s local to me. Less than 5 miles from my house is local, right?
Coming to grips with replication: Well, it looks like Wendell Castle has already done something very similar to what I wanted to create. Lately I’ve been calling it the ‘Dali Table’ because it reminded me of Dali’s melting clocks. Not that it was going to have anything to do with a clock, but that I wanted the table to look like it was melting – liquid. Well, I went on over to Wendell Castle’s website and took a look at some of his desks and tables, and was really surprised to see an almost complete replication (if you can call it that, since he did it first) of what I wanted to do. The proportions of certain features of his ‘Table with Leg’ aren’t what I had imagined, but it was so similar, I almost don’t want to make the table now. Am I being a baby about this? I emailed back and forth with Neil Lamens, over at Furnitology, about this and he had some very interesting things to say about it. Castle’s sculpture background firmly planted him in Art, and thus he creates/created furniture as art. While the rest of us create, mostly, for use and if we can make it look art-like, well, all the better.
A little bit on Safety: This past week Kaytrim (Mike Dove) pointed the ‘Twitter Crowd’ to a LumberJocks discussion topic on workshop safety. Please be careful when bare handing wood with power tools!
The Sawdust Chronicles is available! Erik Pearson and I are now recording episodes of The Sawdsut Chronicles, a podcast for beginning woodworkers, by beginning woodworkers. Our aim: help newbies understand craft terminology and techniques, make the craft less ambiguous and intimidating.
Tags: art, basement workshop, box, chisel, chronicles, furnitology, Furniture, hand tools, Jointer, miter, modern woodshop, planer, Podcast, power tools, Renaissance Woodworker, rough cut, saw, sawdust, Table saw, the wood whisperer, toolmonger, Tools, wood, woodwork, Woodworker
Posted in Furniture, Garage, Podcast, Safety, Tools, Uncategorized, Woodworking | No Comments »