Acceptable over Sizes for Ho Structure Building - Model Railroader Magazine

QUOTE: Originally posted by wickman As well is there an easy way of say taling a 3/16 x 3/16 piece of basswood and bringining it down so it can be used for a 2x4 or the exterior boards down the side of an old shack ?

No.

You'll get into trouble trying this. The trick to cutting small pieces is to start with big pieces that you can hold on to and cut without worrying about losing fingers or getting a splintered scale two by four in your eyeball.

I start by ripping one by fours to one by threes. Four inches is too tall for most ten inch table saws. Then I glue about four of them together flatways to make a solid block with a roughly square cross section. Now you have to dial in the table saw so it's perfectly perpendicular to the table. Don't trust the built-in gauge. Use a machinist's block or a good carpenter's square, and avoid trying to square the blade off the set in the blade's teeth. Get it as close as you can with the square and then test it on some scrap.

You'll be amazed what even a cheap table saw can do for you in terms of cutting thin slices of wood. Use pusher blocks and guide blocks to avoid risking fingers. One you have a bunch of thin wide stock, you can start laying it flat on the table and begin ripping it for width.

I use a 40 tooth blade for cutting small stock. on a 10" saw. This will burn most woods in half inch or thicker stock, which means you either have to sand out the burn, or else change blades for cutting thick versus thin stock.

Alternatively, you could use a planer. The DeWalt 734's manual says you can plane down to a sixteenth, but I wouldn't try that with any wood I cared about due to concern with jamming the drive mechanism. You'd also waste a lot of material, since everything you plane off will end up as chips. You can buy one eighth and one quarter inch stock at most Rocklers in various hardwoods, alread planed smooth, ready to stain or paint.

I still prefer the table saw. Last week I ripped about a scale mile of 14 inch timbers from some one eighth by 1.5 inch molding. The leftover scraps range from 0.053 down to 0.033 inch per a General 0.001 inch micrometer ($10 on sale at Home Depot), but that's just what I ended up with this time around. In the past, I've saved scraps that were thin enough to see through but never measured them. The bigger the piece you start out with, the more consistently you can guide it through the saw, and the better consistency you will see for small piece output.

To get precise dimensions, use a two block.clamp method on setting up the rip fence on the table saw. Eyeball it close, rip a scrap, measure it, and then adjust as follows. Lets say your measured cut is 0.019 inches off what you aimed for, too wide. On the side of the fence away from the blade, clamp some one by scraps, tight to the fence. Once the scraps are in place, loosen and remove the fence. I have a deck of playing cards that are 0.011 inches thick, and some paper that is 0.00375 inches thick, so one playing card and two slips of papar against the block, then re-setting the fence tight to the shims should reduce the size of the rip by a fuzz less than the hoped for 0.019 inches. From there, a sander will do the rest.

If you have a table saw, there's no sense at all in paying high prices for balsa at the LHS when you can cut your own for much less money. I'm currently building a trestle from the 14 scale inch timbers that originated as scrap cut offs of the tongue sand grooves from some cwentral American mahogany flooring I got for free. Expensive homes in a new area sometimes have trucks parked out front with trim carpentry logos on them. I've never been turned down when asking for access to their scrap pile, and you'd be amazed at what gets thrown away. Tons of poplar, plus also cherry, beech, oak, walnut, mahogany, maple, you name it and you can find it.