Woodstock Board Buddies are a cheaper alternative to the (awesome looking) JessEm guides. Thanks to Trent Davis’s page https://www.trentdavis.net/wp/2018/0...sawstop-links/ for clueing me into them. I haven’t tried them yet but when I’m ready to splurge again on more store-bought jiggery, I’m tempted.
I’m relatively new to woodworking but some principles I’ve gathered follow.
When using push sticks to rip, avoid the antipattern of making contact only with the near end of the work. Doing so keeps your hands further from the blade (the visible danger), but it increases the risk of kickback (the invisible danger) - it’s the far end that the blade is trying to lift; pushing the near end away from you horizontally does nothing to control this; and it’s easy to push down as well, which helps lever the far end upwards. The style of stick that bears along the top face of the piece instead of the near end is safer.
Bob Van Dyke’s shop-built L Fence can’t be used on through cuts, but it avoids a number of kickback opportunities for rabbets and tenons.
The less material is cut off, the easier it is for the blade to grab ahold of it, but the less damage it can do when it hits you. You can plan your cuts around: workpiece control, avoiding captive pieces, and minimizing the mass of possible captives. (Sometimes these are competing concerns.)
I like to take an adversarial approach: okay, saw, what ammunition am I giving you today (by sending it to the rear of the blade and letting you grab both sides of it), how might you use it, and do I want to re-plan my cut now that I’ve thought of that. It sounds like a lot of work but you quickly build up a set of idioms for how to make each kind of cut.