Marc: Now today, we're going to take a look at the miter saw,

specifically a sliding compound miter saw.

Again, these manuals always come with instructions

on general safety, and I definitely recommend you read

those things, it's going to be a lot more thorough than

my little video here.

But let me just show you some of the pointers

that I know keep me safe every time I turn this tool on.

So, as with any tool, you should, of course, have your

personal protective equipment on.

At the very least, make sure you are protecting your eyes.

Okay, so a tool like this, you have to consider some of the

things about what you're wearing even.

No long sleeves, okay.

It's very easy for those sleeves to get caught up in the blade,

and you're going to have yourself a problem if you do that.

Um, the way you approach the tool - the great thing

about a miter saw is it doesn't care whether you're left handed

or right handed, so there's no excuse for doing

things like this, okay, holding a work piece over here

and holding the saw with your right hand.

You should never have to do that.

Grab the saw with your left hand, even if you're

right handed, and then hold the work piece with your right hand

and you can go ahead and do your cuts that way.

Never cross your arms.

Now another great feature - some saws have them, some don't -

is a built-in clamp like this.

So when you have a work piece that you need to cut,

really the best thing to do - I'd rather not have

my hand anywhere need the blade if I can prevent it.

Of course, we want to have this imaginary zone that's

probably three or four inches around the blade that we don't

ever want our digits, our hands, or anything to be near.

So if you have a clamp like this, have your work piece in place,

clamp it down, and now this thing is pretty secure.

And you can - I usually do support the work piece, but I'm a lot

further away than I would be if I didn't have this clamp in place,

and now it's safe to go ahead and make your cut.

Now, in a case when you're cutting a really long piece, you want

to make sure that the work piece is completely supported.

Whatever means you need to do that, whether you have

a built-in fence system or, you know, let's say you

build yourself a miter saw station, you want to make sure

the work piece is supported so that once

you make that cut, it's not going to flop to the floor

because that can be very dangerous.

So, I've got the support, I've got a clamp that I'm going to

use here, and let's talk about what we do with

the actual tool itself, okay.

A sliding compound miter saw - some people, and I've seen,

it's a pretty scary thing, they actually start at the

beginning of their cut here, start the motor,

and as they're cutting, pull it toward them,

and that's really dangerous.

That's the, again, kind of like the router thing

that we explained the other day.

It's the direction that the blade wants to go, so if you start

putting your motion in that same direction, you're going to have,

you know, something that really pushes with a lot of force.

So, you want to work against the motion of the blade.

You want the blade to put all its pressure into this

work piece so that it pushes it into the fence and

down onto the flat stable work surface.

So what I always do is I come all the way out, okay,

and I bring it to its full extension point, and then

I turn the saw on, wait for it to come to full speed,

plunge down, and then push back, and that's

the motion I go through.

You'll also notice, when I finish the cut, I let go of the trigger

and I let it stop while it's embedded in this safe housing here.

If you actually bring it back up while the blade is still moving,

you have a chance of creating a problem.

There could be some kick-back, you could -

the other thing is, the quality of your cut goes down when you

do that too,because those little fibers at the end

of the work piece hit the little teeth and you wind up getting,

you know, a less-than-great-quality cut.

So, let's go ahead and actually make a quick cut.

(saw motor running)

Now if you follow that procedure every time,

you're almost guaranteed to have a safe cut.

Now, let's say you want to use a stop block or something

to make repetitive cuts, okay.

We're going to cut this one at about 12 inches.

My bionic eye tells me that that's about 12 inches.

Okay, so, you have an option here.

A lot of times you have either a stop block on the left

or a stop block on the right, and where do you put it?

Well, a lot of it depends on where you're going to

secure the piece from, so let me show you an example.

I have my clamp set up on the left side.

What happens if we set up our stop block over on this side?

Now, whether you use these built-in stops or you actually

literally have a block of wood and a clamp, whatever is,

you know, the most convenient for you is perfectly fine.

But, we have the stop on this side, my clamp is over here,

so let's go ahead and clamp it down.

Now, we've got a situation here.

We're clamped on this side, we're going to make a cut,

and our stop is on this side.

This piece is going to be secure, this one is not.

So, does anyone see a problem with that?

Anybody?

Nicole.

Nicole sees a problem with that.

Very good, Nicole.

The problem here is the loose piece is now sort of

bouncing between the blade and our stop block.

Just like in the table saw, you never want a piece

to be loose between your blade and the fence.

Same exact thing here.

So, you go ahead and make this cut, very dangerous.

Potentially, this piece could fly back at you.

So, how do we, how do we work around that?

Well, what I would do is one of two things.

You just have to decide which side you want to work from.

You can move your clamp so that it's on this side and this piece

then becomes secure and your cutoff piece becomes loose,

or, like I would do, just leave the clamp where it is

and flip this guy over, use this as your stop,

adjust it so it's at least close.

Now I can add my clamp.

My cutoff piece is now free to do what it wants to do,

so if it contacts the blade, it actually will just bounce away

from the blade safely and it's not going to kick back.

So let's go ahead and make that cut

and you can see how it reacts.

(saw motor running)

Very stable, it just sat there.

It can bounce around all it wants and it's not

going to fly back at me.

Now, while I made that cut, I actually took notice

of something that brings up another good point.

This little piece of material back here flew back and,

now this is not a big deal, that's very small,

but there are times when let's say you're just cutting a little

piece off and now you've got a quarter-inch piece of material

that may very well fall back there.

It brings up a very good safety recommendation,

and that is to add something like a backer board.

Okay, this is just a piece of MDF, it happens

to be veneered with cherry, but it's a cutoff.

I just have some double-stick tape here and I'm going to

attach this to the back of the factory fence.

Now, this does a couple things for us.

Not only is it a safety issue, because what it's going to do

is stop those pieces from having that option to go back there.

If they do go back into this little spot here, a lot of times they

bounce around for a little while until they hit the blade

and then they go "vroom" right out the front, so it's

always a good idea to install this here and that

will make sure that any cutoffs stay in the front

and fall down instead of hanging out behind the blade.

All right?

So you install that the first time and you want to make

your first cut to establish your zero clearance.

(saw motor running)

Now, with this kerf cut in here, only the blade

can fit through that tiny little slot.

There's not enough room for the cutoffs to fit through there.

And we have the added advantage, just like a zero-clearance

insert on a table saw gives you a cleaner cut,

same thing here.

All the fibers on the back of your work piece are now

completely supported all the way through the cut,

which means an absolute clean cut at the back edge,

which is great when you're doing finish cuts

on your miter saw.

Now, I would say the most common way to get

a kick-back incident on a sliding compound miter saw

is when people are using it to rough-cut boards, okay.

So let's say like this big piece of wenge here is pretty uneven.

Okay, actually it's not too bad considering, but a lot of times

your rough material, it doesn't sit real steady.

So you put this on here, even if you clamp it down, okay,

you're in a situation where as you cut through,

you release all that pressure, and when everything

settles down, these two halves are going to actually

act very differently than the whole piece did on its own.

So when those pieces then decide to move, once that

pressure is released, you've got a situation where now

maybe more wood is being pushed into the blade

and a lot of times what happens is this saw

comes right back at you.

And a couple things - I mean usually it's okay.

The saw can only go so far, but it scares you,

and secondly it can really knock your saw

out of calibration because it jolts the whole thing.

So when you're rough-cutting lumber like this,

a lot of times it is tempting to use this tool.

I actually prefer to use my jigsaw, though.

It's a lot safer: I set up some saw horses

and I just cut them down to all of my rough lengths

or cut and organize, and then once I have some nice

clean boards to work with that sit nice and level,

then I come to this machine and trim them to

my final lengths at that point.

So, hopefully that'll serve as just a very quick review

of some of the things you need to be concerned about

with this particular tool.

There's a lot of great resources out there.

One of my favorite is actually Mark Adams' Safety Video.

He not only covers the miter saw, but he covers just about

every power tool in the shop, and it's really comprehensive

and covers just about everything you could possibly

want to know about safety on those particular tools.

And his comments and things on the miter saw were pretty

insightful, so I recommend that as a resource for you.

So, we'd just like to take a minute to thank everybody

for watching all the videos this week and participating

and commenting, and all the bloggers and the

pod-casters, the magazine owners, and Fine Woodworking

for supplying us with some of their videos,

and even our sponsor, Rockler, who was able to

supply us with a bunch of great items for the giveaways.

It just turned into an amazing week.

Nicole: Yeah, definitely.

And what we'd like to say is even though we had

Safety Week this week, we know that every week

is Safety Week.

So hopefully what we've done this week has kind of