As part of sawing a kitchen countertop apart to fit it into the bathroom, this happened:
I’d very carefully checked the clearance for the first two cuts, but …
The sawhorse is polyethylene, which cannot be glued, so I drilled holes in the internal bulkheads, slobbered JB Industro-Weld epoxy through them, and filled the gaps with wood blocks:
The goal being to not have metallic fasteners where the saw blade can find them.
This should work for a while:
If that’s never happened to you, I’d say you aren’t doing enough circular saw work…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
9 responses to “Sawed-off Sawhorse”
I tend to set my circular saw to just a 1/16th or 1/8th inch thicker than the material I’m cutting so my mistakes are less…fatal? Though it does suck when you end up being short and must cut a second time, that rarely ends well.
I was being so careful about checking for clearance underneath the countertop that I obviously didn’t need to worry about making a mistake… [grin]
That said, setting the blade slightly deeper than the plank seems to burn the cut much worse than a deeper penetration. Perhaps the blade doesn’t clear chips well enough: it’s carbide-tipped and non-stick coated, but with small gullets. It’s intended to shrug off the odd nail or staple; I have several nicked HSS blades that taught me that error.
Once upon a time we were installing a swinging door on a garage that only had a rolling door. It was at a busy site, with a lot of other (unrelated) stuff going on. We had a monster circular saw that could cut entirely through the wall. We cleared off the stuff stacked against the other side, went inside, and started cutting. Well… at that place, the sight of a big open space against which stuff could be stacked, was like Heaven, so by the time we actually got the cut started someone had stacked a grate intended for keeping animals out of a drainage ditch against the wall. Boy did that make a lot of noise — and we figured we’d just hit a nail, so kept right on cutting. A carbide blade will go through half-inch rebar, it turns out.
Must’a been a sight to behold from the outside: sparks straight up to infinity!
And, of course, nobody could get your attention through the earmuffs and noise and chaos…
Well done!
at least it wasn’t a thumb!
Some day I’ll manage to work that poor thing into a picture of something else…
Those were the days, I was younger and had the fingers…
There are careless sawyers and there are old sawyers, but there are no careless old sawyers…
I enjoy watching early industrial machines: they make me appreciate how far we’ve come!
[…] the bright yellow cap strips fell off. Whether by coincidence or not, it was the same one I’d previously repaired after sawing completely through the poor thing, but this time the failure came from what’s […]