How To Rip A Sheet Of Plywood

This week we re sharing 2 of our most used shantytips when ripping huge pieces of plywood and making cross cuts on them.

How to rip a sheet of plywood.

When i cut plywood i place the plywood on top of the foam and cut right into the foam. We gave the guy a generous tip because it probably was more than they usually cut for free. I keep a piece of rigid foam board in my workshop. And they ripped them down for free.

Set the blade depth to just clear the plywood thickness. Do the same thing on the other end of the sheet establishing two points for your cut line. All 8 sheets of them. I m assuming for this example you need a full length cut a rip down the 8 foot length of the sheet.

Where are you watching from commen. I know this is step 3 but you can cut down plywood in whatever order you wish. Use a drywall square to draw your cut line across the whole sheet. These large sheets of plywood from lowe s come in at the low low price of 13 per sheet.

As long as they re sharp any of these four 7 1 4 in. In general the more teeth the smoother the cut. Speaking of let s discuss the difference in cross cuts vs rip cuts. Put the best edge of the wood against the fence and push the corner of the board into the fence to keep the board tight against the fence throughout the cut image 3.

Blades will make smooth rip cuts in plywood and reasonably good crosscuts. Plywood usually come in 4 x 8 sheets which is a very unwieldy thing to cut with any tool. I do about 1 4 so for ripping 3 4 thick plywood i set my blade to about 1 depth. Of all the tips i can give you this one helped me the most.

The system works well for both rip cuts parallel to the grain and crosscuts perpendicular to the grain. Measure from the corner to your cut line and mark with a pencil. The more stable the plywood the better your chances for a perfectly smooth cut. The disadvantage of the 140 tooth plywood blade is that the teeth will dull much faster than the teeth on the three carbide blades.

The size makes it difficult to keep the sheet flat on the table or bench and. For all of you denser than stone types i m just showing the method here not covering every possible safety precaution known to the human race.