Today Kody and I stopped over at my friend Brent's house to see if he had any 1/8 inch thick aluminum I could bum a piece off. Fortunately he had this really nice sheet of 6061-T6 sheet which he let me cut a slice off of. Thanks, Brent! Anyway, once we got home, I decided to try the table saw to cut the sheet since my Dewalt Miter saw has done such a good job cutting bar stock and angle. It went so well that I decided that I'd try to cut a strip 3/4 inch wide...

...unfortunately, the blade really grabbed the strip and put a big gouge in the edge. Afterward, I decided to check to see if the blade was bent and found a tooth had been broken off the blade. Fortunately Kody and I were both wearing safety glasses, because I have no idea where that tooth flew. So much for this blade...at least it wasn't a really expensive one. I think I may have been OK if I used a finer tooth blade, but I'm just gonna use the band saw from now on.

After that fiasco, we did the rest of the cutting on the band saw and cleaned the cuts up with the sander. It went pretty well, but took a lot longer than if the table saw had worked. Kody is getting very good at sanding right up to the line and also sanding very evenly.

Each of these strips is within a few thousandths of being exactly 3/4 wide. The sides are nearly perfectly parallel too. Nice work, Kody.

He also rounded the end of this one strip as well. This will fit into a moon-shaped notch in the center support to prevent it from sliding forward or aft.