Hey there everybody
I experienced my first bout of kickback today. I was cutting the shoulder cuts for some tenons on the tablesaw…..and then BANG! There I was. My new homemade mitre gauge, broken. The peice that I was cutting, shot. My finger, A rather large splinter. It all happened rather quickly. Perhaps I should pay more attention? Who knows. Just thought that I would share this most memorable experience. My finger is still numb. So now I am just waiting for the glue to dry on a new rail. I am building four doors for a set of offices that I am redoing. This was the fourth door and last rail to cut when it happened.
happens I guess, it is all in the way you wipe up the mess.
Blessings
Derek
Replies
Welcome to the club...
Gotta be sherlock now...FIND out what was wrong..something was amiss..if you do not understand what went wrong you WILL do it again, maybe not so lucky next time..please, do some serious looking at the "homemade" miter gauge, the pc. itself..(what kind of saw marks are left?) And judge your state of awarness at the time..tired? distracted? odd stance? Were ya even a LITTLE scared at the process? Any "funny sounds"? all of that info. may save ya a very bad day.
Were you using a riving knife or splitter on the saw?
Scrit
As stated in an earlier post. Would really like to know HOW this happened. All the details. So we, and you, can avoid it in the future.
I'll jump on the find-out-what-happened bandwagon. So important to figure it out, and please let us know too! Every piece of data helps when it comes to predicting and preventing kickback. I don't have experience with it, but I'd think cutting tenon shoulders would normally be one of the lower-risk activities with regard to kickback.
forestgirl Another proud member of the "I Rocked With ToolDoc Club" .... :>) you can take the girl out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the girl ;-)
Derek, Were you by chance using your fence as a stop block? This is fine if the fence is pulled behind the blade (uni-fence) or a scrap block is fastened to the fence behind the blade, but not with the fence beside the blade, trapping the cut off piece. Just curious.
Ian
Ian, I wondered about that also as using the fence as a stop block can be dangerous. He did say that he had cut all the other tenons and this was his last one.
last one.......good point.
So if it was the last one of 4 doors, you had cut quite a few tenons on some pretty lengthy (and heavy) stock. So if my first guess was wrong then I'll guess that your hands were tired of holding the stock tightly to the mitre gauge and it twisted on the way through the blade.
To answer a few question...
I was using the fence with a scrap piece for a set-up block. I was only defining the shoulder with this cut. Thus only going 1/2" deep. The reason that it happened was I pushed the piece through the blade and I suppose I didn't go far enough through be for retracting my mitre guage. To make these cuts I push the stock through and then pull back the mitre guage and grab my board from the other side of the blade and flip it and cut again. Maybe it sounds dangerous or maybe I just can't explain stuff well. Anyways. I just was careless wtih this cut and that is what did me in. Not paying enough attention I guess. Luckly I still have my ten didgets.
Here is another question. I am looking for to make a longbow and a long sword. Does anyone have any info for me? I did the Google searches already and just curious what you people think. What wood would I use? I want to make something that would replicate something from perhaps the 1500's????
Thank you
Derek
As a lot of you know,kickback happens when the stock contacts the back teeth of the blade, as it spins upward. Whichever way this unfortunately happens,the point is to learn from experience,use squared-up stock, and keep the stock against the fence or firmly on the miter gage(allowing scrap to fall freely).I hope this don't sound preachy. Maybe it'll help.
Both longbows and longswords were pretty much obsolete by early 1500. Good plate armor was pretty common by that time. More effective armaments would have been crossbow and epee, greatsword, halbard,mace, or war hammer; depending on your class.
The traditional bow wood in England was yew. In America, it was osage orange; known in Texas as bois d'arc (or "wood for a bow").
The traditional wood of choice for the English longbow (is there any other kind) is Yew
John
Maybe given the days lesson ...go with the FIBERGLASS bow.
Derek,
Interestingly, at lunch time today there was a PBS advertisment on TV for an upcoming show on making bows. It appears to be about a guy up in New Hampshire who makes them...if I remember correctly. Don't know where your located...PBS NH is channel 44.
BG,
Do you recall the name of the place in NH that makes bows?
There is a neighbor about 2 miles down the road that has a sign at his driveway that says "Lost Nation Archery. Traditional Bows".
Bill
The traditional wood of choice for the English longbow (is there any other kind) is Yew
Hence the term "Plucking Yew" which over the centuries worked it's way into our vernacular as "F*ck You". "Flipping the bird" was also derived from the flights on the arrows.John O'Connell - JKO Handcrafted Woodworking
Life is tough. It's tougher if you're stupid - John Wayne
Derek,
As someone wrote, yew was the preferred wood for an English long bow--but choosing the right wood is the only easy step in making one.
I recently read an article on English long bows. As I understand it a long bow is made from a fairly small diameter tree, only six or so inches. To take advantage of different properties of the yew wood, a proper long bow is formed from stock that's riven in such a way that the bow will be part heartwood and part sap wood. And this is the second easiest thing... Also, IIRC, the wood is supposed to be aged for a century or two.
If you find good instructions on making an English long bow I, for one, would like to know more about it. If you decide to make one I'd enjoy keeping current on your efforts.
Alan
Edited 12/19/2003 3:40:12 AM ET by Alan
There was a legal requirement in England during the midle ages for all men and youths of military age to undertake an hour's archery practice after church on Sunday. To that end many older English churches still have yews in the graveyards surrounding them - these were frequently pollarded so that the trunk produces large numbers of small diameter shoots, ideal for making longbows.
If you are looking for information about the Mediaeval long bow you might do no worse than to look up the terms "Mary Rose" and "long bow". The Mary Rose was Henry VIII's naval flagship which sank off Portsmouth - significantly when her remains were raised a number of years ago they were found to contain large quantities of yew long bows and these have apparently formed the basis of a lot of research into the traditional long bow. You'd have to be strong to draw one, though, I believe that these archers were capable of drawing 65 to 80 pounds.
Scrit
Scrit,
Great minds think alike: it was the finds in Mary Rose that got me interested.
Another story told about English archers is that they originated the two fingered English equivalent to Americans' middle-finger insult. As the story goes, if an English archer was taken prisoner, his captors would often hack off his index and middle finger so he could no longer draw a bow. So in defiance, when the two armies faced each other, un-maimed English archers would wave their two intact bow-drawing fingers while shouting insults at their foes. After a while they settled on one particular invective to accompany the gesture. I don't know if that's really the way it came about; but it makes a good story.
What's this thread about again? (This isn't really a hijack; it's more like a hostile takeover.)
Alan
Alan
That is indeed the generally accepted (by historians, no less!) origin of the Anglo-Saxon two-finger salute. Sadly (?) it is dying out in favour of the one finger variant.....
For some reason we have had a number of documentaries on TV this year about the Hundred Years War, and more significantly about Agincourt with the archery technicians out in force - lots of references back to the Mary Rose finds as they seem to be the main source of info about this sort of weaponry. You may find this link to articles by the Society of Archer-Antiquarians of use.
Scrit
"(This isn't really a hijack; it's more like a hostile takeover.)" ROFL! Note, though: authors are always allowed to hijack their own threads.forestgirl Another proud member of the "I Rocked With ToolDoc Club" .... :>) you can take the girl out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the girl ;-)
Rule # 1
Never !!!!! Does material come back through the blade !!!!
Pick it up & reset. It is not much slower when you get your motion down
On a hill by the harbour
Derek
Kickback occurs when the workpiece meets a rising tooth (i.e. a tooth at the back of the blade) It is preventable by the use of a properly-fitting riving knife, rigid mitre fence (try attaching a hardwood extension fence to the mitre fence to make it more rigid) and by ensuring that your length stop is further back from the leading tooth of the sawblade than the work is wide (to prevent binding). Sorry to ask the questions, but those three items (or a combination) are possibly the potential culprits.
Scrit
Years ago I was called to administer anesthesia to a lumber-yard worker who was in the wrong place when a large rip-saw threw a very heavy plank the length of a long room, striking him in the belly, causing complete rupture of the stomach. Upon opening the abdomen there was stomach contents all over. Surprisingly he made a complete recovery. It helps to focus the attention.
Tom
Hell yah, kickback sucks out loud! Ash is particularly nasty when it comes to kickback. It's a loud bang, then pain, then shock. I have even chipped carbide blades this way. Sorry about your numb finger.
Joey
This forum post is now archived. Commenting has been disabled