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Sunday, May 6, 2012

Cutting Odd Thicknesses for Shims/Spacers

I needed a spacer block to improve a bi-fold door installation recently, and that led me to come up with a neat table saw setup method.

What I needed was a small piece of material that would shift the position of a bi-fold door's closure spring leftward a bit, so the spring would do its job a little more forcefully. Here's a view of what I was dealing with.


Using fractional inch twist drills as gap gauges, I found that the thickness of material I needed was 13/64". Then, using the 13/64" drill as a feeler gauge, I set my table saw's rip fence that distance from the saw blade, like so.



I only needed about a one inch length of material, so I fed a parguet flooring bit[1] to the saw only as far as needed.



'Cut off the needed length, and I had my spacer.



I'm quite pleased with how that went. I expect I'll find the method useful many more times.

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Note:

[1] Leftover parquet flooring material is very useful to have on hand. See this post.

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