Realistic square cut accuracy expectations?

[Frederick Skelly]

Hi Fred, well, I understand your point but I find I run into this issue all the time. I tend to make a lot of projects with flat doors and in a style where everything is tight and symmetrical. This picture below is pretty typical of my projects, it has 6 doors and 6 drawers, is over 7 foot tall and 7 foot wide, a linen closet in the master bath. All the doors and drawers have a gap of approximately 1/8", if any of my panels were off, you would see it immediately. As for fine tuning, you really can't do that after the product has been finished and you don't want to be touching up in the field, so better to be right the first time.

Brian, you do beautiful work. Thanks for the examples and for clarifying. I see your point for the things you build and I agree it's better to get it as right as you can the first time.

Best regards,
Fred

[Sam Murdoch]

Better to get it right the first time - or the second time - at the least, just before it all goes together, rather than after the fact. Words to do woodworking by... I am in agreement .

[Brian Lamb]

Brian, you do beautiful work. Thanks for the examples and for clarifying. I see your point for the things you build and I agree it's better to get it as right as you can the first time.

Best regards,
Fred

Thank you! This is almost all the type of work I do in cabinets, even in kitchens I get long runs with maybe several drawer banks and lots of doors in a 10'-15' run of cabinets. The furniture work becomes easy in comparison, at least for square and perfectly on size, because you are just generally making a stand alone piece... if the dining room table is out of square .030" then who's going to know?

[Andrew Hughes]

Its a small world.
Don't know if you mind me posting this Brian.
Heres one of Brian's Indicator holders I bought from him.Nothing like it out there.I use mine to set my jointer knives on my Oliver.

[Brian Lamb]

Hi Andy,

You got the last one I had in stock, hence the shortened butt on it, was actually a setup part as the blank wasn't quite long enough. I don't mind you guys posting, I just don't want to get in trouble for advertising, hence I didn't mention product in my previous posts.

[Andrew Hughes]

Hi Andy,

You got the last one I had in stock, hence the shortened butt on it, was actually a setup part as the blank wasn't quite long enough. I don't mind you guys posting, I just don't want to get in trouble for advertising, hence I didn't mention product in my previous posts.

Aww cool hoping I wasn't out of line.I am interested in a second red one put me on your list please

To the Op sorry for high jacking your thread.

[Rod Sheridan]

On a cut 30" long I'll be 3 to 4 thousandths of an inch out of square if I use the crosscut fence on the outrigger.

If I just use the short fence on the sliding table I would be less accurate.......Rod.

[Steve Demuth]

Fascinating how this thread got parallelism all tangled up with square. They are very different problems. Even a casually tuned cabinet saw will produce parallel edges to within a few thousands of an inch - as long as your fence is flat, your reference edge is flat, and your technique maintains a tight conformance of reference edge to fence you'll get a parallel cut. Just to prove the point, I detuned my fence to be 1/64" off parallel with the blade (which already has about .004" runout to start with) and cut a 3' long piece of mdf. It mic'd out at parallel +/- .002", except for the leading 1" or so, which was about .010" narrower than the rest. I obviously rotated the mdf every so slightly at the beginning of the cut. But in order to make my pointI wasn't using a featherboard or fence hold-tight - had I been I'd have gotten within .001 - .002" on the entire length.

Getting the narrow dimension truly square to parallel edges on a large panel is much harder, unless you have a slider or very high quality panel saw. I'm happy with 1/64" on that, and often would settle for 1/32" - because, notwithstanding Brian Lamb's beautiful work, and informed opinion, there aren't a lot of cases where it matters much. Unlike parallelism, where common construction techniques very definitely DO accumulate to unwanted visual effect, there aren't a lot of situations I've encountered - other than rail and style or any other joinery where you've got to "close the circle" - where that level error accumulates or is noticeable (to anyone other than the builder, of course).

[johnny means]

IMO, anything meant to be square should be ,for all practical purposes, square. For example an entry door should not run out any amount that can be measured with a tape measure or ruler. This is easy to achieve using any Pythagorean triple.

[lowell holmes]

Before track saws were invented we would rip a 12"+/- wide strip from a sheet of plywood and nail a joined 1x4 into the center of it. We would rip the plywood on
both sides using circular-saw with a plywood blade. Then straight cuts could be made by clamping the guide to the piece being trimmed and ripping with the piece
with the circular saw. I have a 4" Porter Cable circular saw with a good blade that will make that cut in a heart-beat. I used to build houses and job built my cabinets.
I still have the 4", 6" and 8" "skill"-saws.

It is easier to rip a sheet of plywood using this set up than using a 10" table saw. I find that ripping an eight foot length of plywood o a table saw to be dangerous.
I do it if I need to, but avoid it as much as possible.