Festool MFS Fence System Instruction Manual page 19

saw blade is turning away from you and
is held by the uncut portion of the work
piece until after the leading edge of the
blade passes the far end of the work
piece. With the blade set to cut just a
couple of millimeters deeper than the
thickness of the work piece, the cut off
piece is only exposed to that small
amount of blade travel and the cut off
piece is trapped from above so it cannot
be lifted off of the table. If the cut off
piece does get trapped between the
fence and the blade, it will be thrown
away from you but usually is secured by
the rubber on the bottom of the guide rail.
On a traditional table saw it is just the re-
verse. The blade is rotating towards you
so the trapped portion of the cut off is free
to be thrown up and back at you, a situa-
tion called "kickback" that nearly every-
one who has used a conventional table
saw to cut narrow strips against a fence
has experienced. This is a far more dan-
gerous situation than using the Festool
MFS fence and Festool guide rail to make
these thin strip rip cuts.
Here you can see three thin strips all
5mm wide, safely and quickly cut from
the work piece on top of the guide rail
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behind them, this done with no kick back
and no fingers in harm's way.
One of the nicest things about this MFS
rectangle sliding against a stationary
MFS profile set up is that you can recon-
figure it on a moment's notice and rees-
tablish the right angle relationship be-
tween the leading edge of the guide rail
and the MFS rectangle acting as a rip
fence or as a length stop in less than a
minute, no matter where you set the
guide rail. For example, the whole set up
could have been moved further down on
the table to more fully support the work
piece, but I find clamping the work piece
usually does the job even with the set up
this far towards one edge of the table(s).
You can take down and transport the
MFS extrusions as a stack of 80mm by
16mm by whatever length components
and do the whole set up in an off site
work place or can leave the set up just
like it is for repeated in work shop or stu-
dio use. The "V" track nuts, fasteners
and other MFS system components
are very small and easily stored or
transported in a Festool Systainer or
Sortainer.
The MFS is certainly one way to un-
lock the full potential of Festool
guided rail cutting.
Use this set-up for routing as
well
Just cutting pieces to exact size is not
where the usefulness of this set up
stops. You can also rout joints such as
square shouldered tenons to quickly
make rail and stile components, or you
can rout precisely established sliding
dovetails or dados. You also can quickly
rout matching dovetail or dado slots ex-