George Vondriska

Cutting Plywood for Accuracy

George Vondriska
Duration:   8  mins

Description

Want to build cabinets? If so, you’ll probably be using plywood or some other man-made sheet stock for the carcasses. Cutting plywood can be tricky. Who wants to flop those big sheets onto a table saw? It’s much easier to take the tool to the work in this case, instead of the work to a tool. A track saw makes short work of cutting plywood to size. But there are tricks you should pay attention to, in order to get accurate cabinet parts.

Sequence

It’s very important to make sure that the cabinet parts are consistently dimensioned. The length of each piece has to be the same. The width of each piece has to be the same. Paying close attention to the cutting sequence will help you accomplish this.

Start by squaring the plywood. As you work, keep in mind that we want to remove all the factory edges from the parts. Once an end is square you can start cutting parts to length. Be sure to cut enough plywood to satisfy all the parts you need. With the parts cut to length it’s easiest if you switch from a track saw to an edge guide. This will keep the width of your pieces consistent.

More on cabinetmaking

When you get the hang of cabinet making the door opens for you to build shop or kitchen cabinets, vanities, book cases, and more. WoodWorkers Guild of America offers a great deal of instruction on cabinetmaking. Check it out.

More info

For more info on the Kreg Track Saw, and other Kreg products, visit www.kregtool.com, or call (800) 447-8638.

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8 Responses to “Cutting Plywood for Accuracy”

  1. Tim Gaffron

    Hi George, Have you had any issue with the saw track slipping since it’s not clamped down?

  2. Rich

    Just curious, once you got the plywood to a “manageable size, why didn’t you use the table saw instead of the circular saw?

  3. Ed Eldridge

    Hi George, I have a question in reference to the "cutting plywood for accuracy" video. When using a track saw, you allowed for the width of the blade when making a cut with the motor of the saw on the waste side of the cut. if you turned around and cut from the opposite direction, with the motor on the keep side, you could place the track on the cut line and not have to allow for blade width. Is this a good practice or would I lose accuracy with measurements?

  4. Anne

    I am a new woodworker, and probably have a stupid question. How did you avoid nicking the supporting frame when cutting the big plywood sheets?

  5. Robert G VanValkenburg

    what direction does a table saw blade go teeth going down or up and what about a cir saw all ways get it wrong

  6. leninsebastopol

    As the factory edge is not square then taking a line from it with the rule is not true either, no? Or is it simply avoiding edge chips & dings? And, thanks, Paul.

  7. Roger

    I have always squared every plywood piece cut from a sheet of plywood. That still implies to me that mfgr. should shoot for square themselves out of the shute.

  8. Daniel

    I have been a woodworker since High School. (30 + years) I was always taught to keep the factory edge. Why do you say "cut it off"?

If you're going to build cabinets, you probably gonna use plywood or some other kinds of sheet stock. So let's talk through an approach or two that's going to help make your parts consistent, help you get good cut quality, so when you put the cabinets together, everything goes the way you want it to. Now first thing, I'm going to be making these cuts with a circ saw on a track. So we have to think about which side should be up. Remember that a circ saw cuts up. So as a result, we want good face down, bad face up. So, first thing, I'm gonna flip this over. Now, when I'm teaching my cabinet making classes, there are some things I really try to get my students to understand, and one of them is the idea that consistency is often more important than accuracy as it affects cabinet making. What I mean by that is that when we cut our case sides, which we're going to do in a second, we really want to make sure every case side is exactly the same size. Every top and bottom are exactly the same size. So a lot of that comes to how you use the tools, how you think through this process. Before we get to that, first step, we need to square an end off on the plywood. You can't rely on the plywood being perfectly square, you got to make it square. So, using a framing square, we're going to strike a line. And then with the track for my track saw, the edge of that blue guide is exactly where the blade is going to cut. So I can put that right on my pencil line, just like that. And it's pretty cool. There's a sticky strip on the bottom of this guide. So as a result, I don't even have to clamp it in place. All I have to do is make the cut. That gives us a nice square end. Now, I'm going to mark that end 'cause that's the end I just cut. It's good to keep track of that. I'm also going to mark the edge closest to me because that's the edge I squared from. That's going to come into play in just a little bit. And what I can do now is 'cause that end is already square, I can measure and measure and then use my track again. Now the observant among you are going to notice that the saw blade is on this side of the cut. So when I marked out this length, I allowed for the width of the saw blade 'cause we're about to take that off of the case side. Now, on the case-side side of the cut, because the track's not over that, our cut quality is good, but not necessarily great. And that's okay 'cause that's the inside of the cabinet and the top or bottom, top and bottom are going to cover that. With the top and bottom, we're going to treat things a little bit differently. Okay, sides are done. I'm going to take this off-cut and flip it around. and the reason I'm doing that is so that when I make my cut for the top and bottom, the track will cover the piece I'm keeping, giving me great cut quality there. So second verse same as the first. Mark, track, cut. Now on this one, you can really see that cut quality is great because we have a zero clearance effect that comes from the track. Now let's go back to this, consistency is more important than accuracy. Here's what we just did. If I make making kitchen uppers that are 11 1/4 inches wide, which is what we're doing, I can get four of those out of this piece, four of those out of that piece. So by doing this approach, I just cross cut four pieces to exactly the same length and those four pieces to exactly the same length. So even if they're a little bit off of the measurement I want, they're all exactly the same, and that's what's really critical. We're gonna do a little setup change here and the next thing we'll do is start ripping these to width. Remember we started this process by squaring an end on the plywood. Now in a similar vein, the other thing you want to keep in mind is, we want to eliminate all the factory edges from the pieces. So the next thing we're ready to do is rip our parts to width, but don't just measure from the edge and make a cut 'cause we want to get rid of that factory edge. So I want 11 1/4 inch pieces because that's how deep kitchen uppers are but I'm not going to set at 11 1/4 now. I'm going to set a little bit oversize. 11 3/4 is going to be just fine. Rip the parts oversized, then come back and finish them at their final width. Same thing to the piece that's for the tops and bottoms. Then we'll come back and do our cuts to get them down to their final width. I've got both parts cut, and now we've got pieces that are a little bit oversize in width. So I can reset my rip guide to 11 1/4. That's the finish width of our cabinets. Now what I'm doing is working off of the cut edge. So I'm going to follow that edge I just cut, take these parts down to their final size. Same process for the part that's my cabinet, top and bottom. In fact, same process for all of our parts. So again, what's cool about this is that we're not cutting the pieces until we're ready to cut all the pieces. So this approach that I showed you here is going to guarantee that all the sides are the same length, all the tops and bottoms are the same length, then each of those pieces is also the same width. Even if they're not the exact number you wanted, you're going to be okay because they're all going to be identical because consistency is often more important than accuracy. So this is a good approach; I use it all the time for getting your plywood cut to size when you're building cabinets. Follow this procedure, it's a great recipe, and it's going to help make your cabinets more accurate, more consistent.
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