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I used to make hundreds (maybe thousands) of feet of Formica edge banding back in my cabinet shop days.

Clamp a block of wood to the fence of your table saw about .020" higher than the thickness of the material you're cutting right over the blade. Sand a bit of an eased entry ramp on the underside to make it easy to feed the material into the saw. Clamp the block on with the blade all the way down, and then raise the blade up into the block. That's your hold down, and it's also a complete saw blade guard. No way to get your fingers in there. If you're ripping thin stock, make a custom featherboard for the infeed, and perhaps put a kerf splitter on your zero clearance saw table insert. Then you can feed into the blade and also safely pull the stock out on the outfeed side...an operation you should never do without a fully covered blade.

lance,
what about that jig you made when you were cutting abalam sheets into strips. wouldn't that do the job?

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Dave Bland

remember...

"If it doesn't play in tune...it's just pretty wood"

I dont think so, it might, but I have some great ideas there to try first.

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Lance@LuthiersForum.com

Bit late to the party but I've used this setup many times for slitting ABS bindings (up to .090" thick) and laminated purfling strips. Never had much trouble with it. You're basically shimming the right block to the material thickness (shims press against side of material) and then moving it left (so now it also holds DOWN the material). Clamp an exacto blade to the left edge of this block, tap it 'till it just contacts the binding, & pull the binding through. Flip END FOR END and feed & pull it through again. Re-tap the blade a bit deeper and repeat. Keep going 'till it seperates.I've gone down to .060 wide , but in theory, you could do anything! No losses due to kerf (I hate that!) & very safe. Only thing you can do wrong is screw up the "flip" so the top & bottom slits are not vertically aligned.

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Dave
Milton, ON