Woodworking With Gloves: Am I Crazy?
Before you answer that question, let’s discuss.
This photo was in a recent newsletter from Fine Woodworking. Notice the gloves?
Everything I read regarding safety in the shop says don’t wear gloves when operating machinery. Gloves can get caught in moving parts and suck you in. It makes sense. Don’t wear loose clothing, tie back your hair and don’t wear gloves. But, I am not one to just let things go unquestioned. Are gloves in the shop really that dangerous?
These are the gloves that I currently wear from Home Depot.
I almost always wear gloves in the shop, even while operating machinery. They are tight-fitting cloth gloves with nitrile-dipped palms from Home Depot. I like them because they are inexpensive, fit great, aren’t too hot, and give me excellent grip. I especially like to wear them when I am using the jointer, but I find the grip to be helpful any time that I am pushing smooth-planed wood through a tool like the table saw.
I use the jointer (mine is 12″ wide) to flatten the wide face of all of my lumber before it goes through the thickness planer, leaving it flat and straight. On wider, longer and heavier boards it takes a lot of force to move them across the jointer. Often, I am really leaning into it and the gloves are the only way that I can get enough grip. I know push blocks are recommended, but they are slow and very cumbersome to use when you are faced with several days of jointing rough lumber.
On the table saw and router table, the enemy is smooth wood. I constantly envision myself losing my grip and pushing my hand right into the action. Guards, of course, would help, but we all know that there isn’t one on my table saw and there probably isn’t one on yours either. On the router table it is easier to cover the cutter and be productive, but I still want a good grip, so that I don’t jam my hand into the bit. I think gloves are the answer.
So, why are gloves dangerous? They are dangerous because if you accidentally touch that table saw blade, instead of just getting cut, you will get cut, sucked in, and cut some more. To that, I say, “Well, don’t touch the blade.” I have been doing this a long time and I still get a little nervous when my hand is getting in the vicinity of the blade. I pay attention, think about what could go wrong and try to avoid it. I always picture myself at my college bakery job at 3 a.m. making donuts. I am tired, the floor is covered with grease, my knees are locked and I am leaning forward over a boiling vat of death. But, no matter how tired I was, I knew that if I lost my balance and fell forward, I was going to catch myself on the side of the fryer and not in the bottom of the hot oil. The thought of my hand frying like a donut goes a long way to making me focus and so does the idea of sticking my hand in the table saw. Gloves aren’t an issue if you keep your hands out of the saw.
Now that I have tempted fate and thrown it out to the universe, let’s say my hand does go into the proverbial “fryer”. If I am wearing a glove, is my result guaranteed to be worse because of it? I have heard stories from friends of friends and distant acquaintances on the internet about how things were bad because of a glove. But, what about the times that an accident was averted because of gloves? It is certainly possible. Nobody is going to tell a story of how they didn’t put their hand in the saw because they had a firm grip and everything went smoothly. There is no gore there, no tale of doom to pass down from generation to generation.
I would only use these loose-fitting gloves for moving lumber. Not for work around tools.
With this in mind, I tried to be more scientific and find studies about gloves in the workplace. The one that I found to be the most relevant only asked questions of people who were injured on the job and whether they were wearing gloves or not. They really needed to ask glove wearers about specific times when the gloves either made their outcomes better or worse. But again, worse outcomes are going to get more airtime because you can’t identify when things went better or nothing went wrong.
For now, I am still wearing my gloves. They make me feel confident when I am close to the tools, and I think that goes a long way towards safety. In the meantime, I hope to find more scientific data and plan to do some tests by sticking gloves in the tools to see how things go. I just need to find some volunteers.
Let me know your thoughts and if you have any first-hand accounts.
Pattern Guides On The Table Saw: Fast In The Straightaways
I’ve never seen it done before or demonstrated on any woodworking shows, and this would be the last thing that I would come up with on my own. But, thanks to Don Snyder, a fellow St. Louis Woodworkers Guild member, I can now add using a pattern to cut pieces on the table saw to my playbook. It sounds simple, and it is, once you understand what is happening.
The outside edge of the auxiliary fence and blade should line up for square cuts.
Don’s program was provocatively titled, “How to cut polygonal shapes.” I initially thought that there was going to be a lot of talk about angles – and there was. The information was “informative”, but seemed like something I could figure out on my own if I needed to. I could figure out the angles necessary for a 32-sided shape; but I was looking for a trick, something that I hadn’t seen before, and Don delivered.
This fence is for short pieces. Make sure the auxiliary fence is long enough to start and finish the cut with the pattern against the fence.
The reason for using a pattern on the table saw is to produce exact copies of shapes with multiple sides quickly, accurately and repeatedly. This is necessary for making more than one simple project or a lot of pieces for a complex project. Don got in deep, even showing how to use this method to make three-dimensional shapes like polyhedrons.
The first step it to make a pattern, a perfect pattern, of the shape that you would like to repeat. For this method, especially on the table saw, all the sides of the shape need to be straight lines. The table saw is not good at curves. The pattern is cut from 1/4″ thick material, which is easily worked and provides enough structure to run along a guide. MDF is fine for short runs. Plywood is more durable and a better pick for longevity. Solid wood is not a good pick because it is not dimensionally stable. Remember, accuracy is very important.
Top views of the pattern and an end view of the fence and blade show how the alignment of the three makes a perfect copy, one edge at a time.
The next step is to secure the pattern to the wood that will be your final piece (or, of course, a test piece). This can be done with nails, double-stick tape, spray adhesive, etc. as long as the pattern can later be removed and not damage your final piece. You want the pattern to stick firmly to the piece you are cutting. If not, the lumber could twist on the sawblade and cause a violent kickback (this is something you want to avoid).
All that is left to do is to make your auxiliary fence for the pattern to follow. This fence will attach to your regular fence and extend over the blade so that the outside edge of the fence is above and in line with the outside edge of the table saw blade. Set the blade to just clear the thickness of your final material and set the auxiliary fence about 1/16″ above the blade. The auxiliary fence should extend well beyond the front of the blade so that the pattern can engage the fence before the final material is cut (this is also for safety, as well as accuracy). The same is true on the back of the fence to allow for a safe finish on the cut.
Cutoff pieces will accumulate under the fence. Stop the saw and remove them.
To cut a piece like a pentagon, first make a perfect pattern then attach it to a board. Put the pattern against the auxiliary fence well before the blade and push it through. Rotate the pattern to the next side and make a similar cut. Do this for all five sides and you have a pentagon exactly the same as the pattern. Watch closely for cut off pieces accumulating under the fence and remove as necessary. Don said he turns off the saw and removes the cutoffs after every cut to avoid them binding in the enclosed space and kicking back.
This setup ends up working like a router with a bushing that follows the pattern, with a couple of major differences. The router can follow curves, as well as straight cuts, while the table saw method will only work on straight cuts. However, the table saw can be set to cut at an angle, which is essential for joining three-dimensional shapes like a polyhedron. The table saw method also allows the pattern to be followed with only one step, while the router method usually requires a rough cut beyond the pattern (done with a saw) before the finish cut with the router. Both methods have their advantages, but the table saw wins on the straight cuts, which was Don’s focus. As a matter of fact, Don started his presentation showing several pictures of woodworking with organic shapes and all of them were crossed out with big X’s. Don doesn’t like curves.
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