Hardwood Floors June/July 2024

By Jason Elquest HARDWOOD HINTS

DIY Track Saw

You can make a track saw at any jobsite with a standard circular saw and a scrap piece of plywood. You can make them shorter for cutting doors or longer for cutting out borders. They don’t cost much and if they get beat up, you can create a new one. The track will be fit to the particular saw you use for the final cut. This is because the distance from where we are going to run against our edge is going to be consistent with that saw and that blade, so using a different brand of blades or a different kerf is going to change your zero cut edge. I snap a line across the plywood as a reference, but also have one good factory edge, which I will use. Now that we’ve cut our straight edge, we have our factory edge and place that on the board. I put some screws and glue in place to hold it together. I will often put sticky tape on the back along the edge or even a little bit of sandpaper on an unfinished floor to hold it in place. Next, I set the depth of my saw. I only want to cut through the top piece, and I’m going to run the inner edge of my skill saw along the factory edge, and that should create a zero edge on my piece of wood. Now, this is my straight edge, and I can line it up on anything straight that I want to cut, and my blade will cut along the edge as long as the foot of my saw rides along that edge.

WATCH IT! See Jason Elquest complete this process in a video on NWFA's Facebook and Instagram pages.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF NWFA

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