Brice Burrell
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- Mar 13, 2007
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Step by Step for the Festool Parallel Guides by Brice Burrell
I've been surprised by the numbers of questions I've gotten about the use of the new Festool Parallel Guides. The concept seems simple enough, extruded aluminum story sticks with adjustable stops that attach to the guide rail. I'm not completely sure were all the confusion comes in but I recently had small job that Parallel Guides were perfect for so I took that opportunity to take my camera along to document the process.
I have a long time friend that tends to ignore his household chores and home improvement projects he's started. So when I received his phone call I had a pretty good idea his wife was reminding him to follow through on some of those projects he promised to do around the house. So I threw a few tools in my truck and headed out to give him a hand.
The job that required the Parallel Guides was ripping a sheet of MDF into 12" pieces for shelving. If you've ever handle full sheets of 3/4" MDF (about 80 lbs.) you know you want to move it as few times as possible. So out of the truck and onto saw horses was enough of moving the sheet for me. I'm using saw horses on this job because I wanted everything to be as easy as possible and the quality of the cuts weren't particularly important. Besides it really illustrates that even the simplest setup will work for sizing sheet goods with the Festool TS saw and Parallel Guides. I take the time to setup a nice cutting table when high quality cuts are needed.
Step One: Straight line cutting the first edge.
Trimming edge of the sheet is the first step, this is done without the Parallel guides on the rail. This cleans up any damaged to the edge and makes it perfectly straight. Material like MDF is oversized for this very reason but most some sheet goods aren't oversized so be sure to account for this first cut when figuring out what your sheet will yield.
This cut can be as little as 1/16" but generally I like to take off enough to have some material on the offcut side of the blade, around 1/4" total. The goal is cut material the entire length of the sheet to make a perfectly straight edge and free of any imperfections. I'm using the 3000 mm rail but a couple of rail joined will work fine too. I'll use this clean straight edge to reference the stops on the Parallel Guides but first they'll need to be attached to the rail and that's the next step.
Step Two: Attaching the Guides to the rail.
The Guides attach to the rail at two points. The Guides have a lever on the bottom and knob on the top (on the T bracket), these lock the guide to the rail. Loosen the knob by turning it counter clockwise and flip the lever up.
With the guide in the unlocked position slide it onto the rail by inserting the tab into the lower channel and the T bracket over the top channel on the rail, seen below.
To lock the Guide flip the lever down flush with the guide and turn the knob clockwise until tight. The second Guide gets attached the same way but on the other end of the rail.
Sliding the stops on is the next, they fit into the channels on the sides of the Guides. A lever locks the stops in place. The Guides have a scale marked in metric only, while converting inches into metric isn't hard it can be difficult to setting the stops to fraction of a millimeter. In the next step I'll show you a quick way around this problem.
More to come....
I've been surprised by the numbers of questions I've gotten about the use of the new Festool Parallel Guides. The concept seems simple enough, extruded aluminum story sticks with adjustable stops that attach to the guide rail. I'm not completely sure were all the confusion comes in but I recently had small job that Parallel Guides were perfect for so I took that opportunity to take my camera along to document the process.
I have a long time friend that tends to ignore his household chores and home improvement projects he's started. So when I received his phone call I had a pretty good idea his wife was reminding him to follow through on some of those projects he promised to do around the house. So I threw a few tools in my truck and headed out to give him a hand.
The job that required the Parallel Guides was ripping a sheet of MDF into 12" pieces for shelving. If you've ever handle full sheets of 3/4" MDF (about 80 lbs.) you know you want to move it as few times as possible. So out of the truck and onto saw horses was enough of moving the sheet for me. I'm using saw horses on this job because I wanted everything to be as easy as possible and the quality of the cuts weren't particularly important. Besides it really illustrates that even the simplest setup will work for sizing sheet goods with the Festool TS saw and Parallel Guides. I take the time to setup a nice cutting table when high quality cuts are needed.
Step One: Straight line cutting the first edge.
Trimming edge of the sheet is the first step, this is done without the Parallel guides on the rail. This cleans up any damaged to the edge and makes it perfectly straight. Material like MDF is oversized for this very reason but most some sheet goods aren't oversized so be sure to account for this first cut when figuring out what your sheet will yield.

This cut can be as little as 1/16" but generally I like to take off enough to have some material on the offcut side of the blade, around 1/4" total. The goal is cut material the entire length of the sheet to make a perfectly straight edge and free of any imperfections. I'm using the 3000 mm rail but a couple of rail joined will work fine too. I'll use this clean straight edge to reference the stops on the Parallel Guides but first they'll need to be attached to the rail and that's the next step.
Step Two: Attaching the Guides to the rail.
The Guides attach to the rail at two points. The Guides have a lever on the bottom and knob on the top (on the T bracket), these lock the guide to the rail. Loosen the knob by turning it counter clockwise and flip the lever up.


With the guide in the unlocked position slide it onto the rail by inserting the tab into the lower channel and the T bracket over the top channel on the rail, seen below.

To lock the Guide flip the lever down flush with the guide and turn the knob clockwise until tight. The second Guide gets attached the same way but on the other end of the rail.

Sliding the stops on is the next, they fit into the channels on the sides of the Guides. A lever locks the stops in place. The Guides have a scale marked in metric only, while converting inches into metric isn't hard it can be difficult to setting the stops to fraction of a millimeter. In the next step I'll show you a quick way around this problem.
More to come....