As hopefully all of you know, if you’re cutting a piece on the table saws with a miter gauge or sled, you shouldn’t also use the fence, as that can over-constrain your piece, causing kickback or other problems. But you often will still want to use the fence to size your piece. The solution is to put a piece of known width against the fence but ahead of the blade, repositioning the fence by that width. You get the length set against that piece, but you aren’t up against it by the time your piece reaches the blade.
For a while Charley had kept a 3/4” block in the fence tray for exactly such a purpose. But it’s easy to make a math mistake when adding 3/4” to your desired length, plus it was made of MDF and was therefore 3/4”ish, depending on the humidity, etc. it eventually got lost.
So I finally got around to making such a spacer of aluminum. Because it’s a lot easier to add 1 than 3/4, I made it 1”. More precisely, It is 1.000” plus or minus about 0.003”. (Yeah, the old mill is in really bad shape, but that should still be good enough accuracy for cutting wood.) I put a slot in it so that you can clamp it to the fence with a micro-jig clamp without the clamp getting in the way.
Setting piece width on the spacer:
Off the spacer, ready to cut safely.
I’m making it available for general use; I left it and a micro jig clamp on the shelf with the general purpose sled.
Note for anyone ambitious: we really need someone to make a left side only sled. Without it, this trick only works if your piece is to be cut over 18” wide.