When I first got my shop set up, I had a table saw but I didn’t have a miter saw in the shop. So I got to do all my cross cutting on the table saw as accurately as I possibly could. Everything from chair parts to table parts to face range for cabinets. Everything got done on a saw. So I learned a lot of good techniques and tips and tricks about how I could do that cross cutting so let me show one, one case what I needed to do was crosscut lots of long parts.

So one rule in woodworking is that you don’t want to use the miter gauge and the rip fence together because you can get a piece of wood trapped in here between the two and that’s very dangerous. However, we can use the fence as a stop block if we put a block like this on it so that we stand of off the fence once we start making the cut. So this is pretty simple what I've got here is a piece of wood, one inch stop lock. I machined it to a perfect one inch thickness.

That makes the math easy because I've got a cursor. I've got a pointer on the fence now I can use the ruler on the fence to set the fence position. All I have to do is set the fence for a perfect one inch more than what I need. So I clamp the stop lock on. That’s the first step. Now, notice that when I put the stop lock on I kept it up off the bed of the table saw itself. That’s because as I slide parts over one thing I found is that you're going to get saw dust on the table. And if this is tight to the table saw dust is going to get trapped between in there and you're going to get tripped.

You're going to be up against saw dust, not up against the stop lock and as a result when you make your cut it's going to be too short. So make sure you hold the stop lock up like this and then all I have to do is set the fence position. Don’t forget to add an inch there because of our one inch stop lock. And now, I can slide this over until it kisses the block, move forward and make a cut.

With this simple setup I could cut one part, I could cut a thousand parts. The stop lock and the fence are going to guarantee that every one of them is exactly the same. If I have to come back in the future and cut more parts of the same length, very, very easy to duplicate that setup by using stop lock in the fence. So great technique for cross cutting many, many parts get them all perfectly identical.