Circular saw and track saw

Break the sheet down where it lies

A full sheet of plywood is 32 square feet and about 60 lb, and manoeuvring one across a table saw single-handed is the least safe thing in a home shop. The alternative is to leave it on sawhorses or a sheet of foam on the floor and take the saw to the work — rough cuts an inch or so oversize, then trim to final size on the table saw where the fence is.

That two-stage approach is also what makes a table saw's guillotine constraint workable: the circular saw does the breaking down, and the table saw does the precision.

A thinner kerf does not rescue the layout

Track saw blades are thinner than table saw blades — around a sixteenth against an eighth — and it is tempting to assume that buys back the part that would not fit. It does not. Two 24" parts plus even a sixteenth still come to more than 48", so the sheet still yields one of them and an offcut.

No kerf is small enough to make a nominal half-sheet part fit twice. The part has to be undersized, and that is a decision for the cut list rather than for the blade.

What a track actually buys

A track saw is a circular saw that rides on an extruded rail, and the rail does three things a clamped straightedge does not. Its rubber splinter guard sits exactly on the cut line, so you place the track on the line itself rather than offsetting by the distance from blade to shoe. It holds the saw against tipping, so the cut stays square through the thickness. And it scores the veneer as it goes, which is most of the reason a track saw's cut in plywood needs no further trimming.

A straightedge and an ordinary circular saw will do the same job for the price of remembering the offset, and a strip of masking tape along the line will get you most of the way on tear-out. The track is a convenience worth buying if you break down sheets often and not otherwise.

Support the offcut, not just the part

The cut that pinches and kicks back is the one where the offcut sags as it separates and closes on the blade. Cutting on a sheet of rigid foam on the floor solves it completely — the blade set a couple of millimetres past the plywood scores the foam and everything stays supported on both sides of the cut.

On sawhorses, put the rails so that both halves are carried after the cut rather than one half hinging off the end.

What this page does not tell you

• —The kerf figures here use a sixteenth for a track saw and an eighth for a table saw. Measure your own — blades vary, and the number is what every cut list calculation is built on.
• —Nothing on this page is a safety instruction. A circular saw binding in a cut is the common way one gets away from you; read the manual that came with yours.
• —This site does not test tools and does not rank them. Whether a track is worth it is a question about how often you break down sheets, not one this page can answer for you.