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Spent 2 hours setting up a stop block on a 40 inch rip and it was the best money I never spent
Three days ago in my shop in Akron I was about to rip down some 8/4 walnut for a set of drawer fronts. My old habit is to just clamp a scrap and eyeball it, which usually means one or two pieces come out a hair off and I have to shim them. This time I took 10 minutes to clamp a real stop block off my crosscut sled fence and ran all six pieces without measuring again. Not one had to be redone, and the grain lines up better than anything I've done in a while. Do you all set a stop for rips too, or is that only a crosscut thing for you?
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carr.elliot16d ago
Wait, you mean rip as in cutting along the length of the board? A stop block only works for crosscuts or repeated cuts to length, it can't guide a rip cut along the grain because the fence is what keeps the board against the blade. If you clamped a block at the end of a rip you'd just be pinching the wood between the block and the blade, which is a recipe for kickback. My guess is what you actually did was crosscut those drawer front blanks to length off the sled fence, and yeah, that's the move, a stop block there is night and day compared to eyeballing a pencil line. For actual rips I just set the fence once and lock it down, and if I need repeat widths I'll use a featherboard and a push block to keep things steady.
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