To get furniture-grade crosscuts, you must use a table saw. When Senior Editor Travis Larson crosscuts a whole pile of short pieces to the same length, he clamps a specially dedicated block of wood to the table saw fence. It’s an old standard trick, but the difference is that his block is laminated for easy sliding. More important, it’s exactly one inch thick.

He clamps the block on the fence and adjusts the table saw fence gauge to the desired length, plus one inch, and saws the pieces. The one-inch thickness eliminates any head-scratching and mistakes from using any old scrap block. For safety, he positions the block so the work piece he’s cutting loses contact with the block before the cut begins. That all but eliminates any chance of kickback.