There have been a few discussions about the merits of cutting sheet goods with a Guided Circular Saw System (GCSS) vs a table saw equipped with a sliding table. I thought that speed and the results would be similar but had no figures to back me up.
Last November in the thread http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=25535, Charlie Plesums stated that he cut 21 pieces in 20 minutes from two sheets of 4' x 8' plywood on his MiniMax combo machine. Furthermore, his cuts were dead on accurate. That’s an average time of 57 seconds per piece.
Today, I had to make 36 pieces from four sheets 18 milimetre Baltic birch (5' by 5' size), so I decided to time the process.
Here is a breakdown of the steps and the time taken for each (rounded up to the nearest 5 seconds):
1) Retrieve and set up the saw horses and cutting panel: 4:30
2) Retrieve and joint up two Festool guide rail so that I could do cuts longer than 140 centimetres: 0:50
3) Bring each of 4 plywood sheets into the shop and position them on the cutting panel: 0:40 per sheet.
4) Rip the sheets into 5 (or 6) 30 centimetre wide strips. In order to eliminate the factory edges this required either 6 or 7 cuts per sheet: 3:15 for three sheets and 3:35 for one sheet.
5) Tear down the saw horses and cutting panel and put them away, then set up the Festool Multi-function table: 3:20
6) Using the Festool Multi function table, cross-cut the results of step 4 into two pieces (3 cuts) for each of 4 sections and into three pieces (4 cuts) for each of 16 sections: 1:05 for 4 sections and 1:25 for 16 sections.
Total time taken: 49 minutes
This works out to an average of 82 seconds per piece, so I lose to Charlie. By the way, the pieces that I cut were "perfect", just like the ones Charlie cut.
If you don't count the time it took to set up and tear down my equipment, I averaged 67 seconds per piece -but this is still not as good as the 57 seconds achieved by Charlie.
Here are photos of some tasks:
1 The set up of the cutting panel upon the saw horses
Cutting table all set up -small.JPG
4) Ripping a section
Cutting a section -small.JPG
6) Cross cutting a piece on the Festool MFT
Using MFT for ripping pieces -small.JPG
-) 36 "perfect" pieces of plywood
36 cut pieces of plywood -small.JPG
Routing: In post #11 in this thread, I added timings for the task of routing rabbets and dados.