Pico’s Projects: Alternative to a Zero Gap Throat Plate
Hi, friends! I wanted to share with you something I learned today: how to create an alternative to a zero gap throat plate. Building a proper zero gap throat plate has been on my woodworking TODO list, but I have not gotten to it yet. However, the time to act was now as I needed to rip a bunch of narrow strips of wood. There was a tornado in the area this summer and it took out a lot of beautiful old trees. This ‘windfall’ coupled with access to a family member’s bandsaw mill means that I could start stockpiling some wood for future projects. Wood needs to dry before it can be used and air needs to be able to flow around the wood to dry it evenly. To do that, stickers (little wood pieces) are placed in between the boards to allow that airflow.
When you rip small pieces of wood on a table saw there is a chance the waste will slip in between the blade and the tabletop. Let me tell you, it is very unnerving when this happens.
There are multiple tutorials on how to make a new throat plate and I was going to bite the bullet and just do it. However, that ‘little’ project was going to take multiple hours and I had a lot of ripping to do. While watching a tutorial (Thank you, Stumpy Nubs) and taking notes, I caught on to a temporary way accomplishing the same task. If you set the fence to the width that you want to rip and then slide a piece of thin plywood you can make a temporary zero gap plate. It just so happens that I’ve received a large item that came with quarter inch plywood as packing material. Huzzah! The first cut seemed to work well, so I clamped into place to give it a test run. It worked just fine! The only issue is that the plywood board was a little short so care was needed to not lever the wood piece up and working with thin stock means I was using push sticks in both hands.
Many rips later and I had the stickers that I needed to stack the wood. Procrastination pays off again! I’m glad this worked out because I would probably still be in the garage trying to build a proper throat plate, but instead I’m writing this post. In a couple of months, I’ll probably have to build a kiln (stay tuned!) to finish the drying if I want to use this wood any time soon. Otherwise, I’ll have to wait years and this is a lot of shop space use up. Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it.
