I am looking to purchase a small miter box to start the assembly of my saw mill. Micromark has two types. One has slots for the wood (22115) and the other one has plastic guides (83277) to hold the wood in place. Does anyone have either of these boxes or could you recommend one over the other? Also the saws have 54 & 24 teeth. What is best for cutting small pieces of wood. The one I have now is 35 teeth I believe and it has had a hard life cutting everything so it will need to be replaced.
really, it depends on the type of material you’re cutting. If it’s scale stuff, you’d probably do better with a NWSL chopper instead of a miter box (not that a miter box would be bad).
I’d go with finer TPI (54) for small things, as it’s less likely to grab a chunk of the piece and tear it out.
I honestly don’t know how many teeth my razor saws have per inch (or are razor saws a standard number of teeth per inch?), but that’s what I use. As far as mitre boxes are concerned, I am using the Easy Mitre Box by Midwest Product Co. It is plastic. I imagine there are better ones, especially by Micro Mark but the one I have works OK for me so far. One advantage of using the mitre box that I have is that it has plastic chucks that can be pegged into the holes in the floor of the box to keep the work steady as it is being cut.
I have one of the item no. 22115 miter boxes, and I clamp a piece of wood in place to use as a template to make repetitive cuts. In looking at the pictures of both boxes, it appears that the other box (item no. 83277) has narrower slots, which would help in making more accurate cuts.
The 22115 allows for cuts at 2 angles - 45 and 90 degrees, but allows left and right 45 degrees.
The 83277 has five angles but you’ll have to cut wood upside down half the time depending on which way the angle needs to go - not a problem for flat pieces but angle pieces and such may require a sacrificial support piece under them.
The 22115 has channels in the bottoms for certain sizes, but pieces just a little wider may have trouble riding over the grooves, so you may need a sacrificial false bottom.
My miter box is flat bottom with 45 and 90 which I like, but in this case I would go with the 83277 for it’s greater number of angles.
For small pieces you want the 54 tpi blade (the rule of thumb I try to follow is at least 3 teeth in the cut, 5 is better). For larger pieces it will be slower going, but gives a smoother cut.
I have the #83277 miter box and it works great but is a little hard to hold the material you are cutting. The saw cuts on the pull stroke and works good on wood but sometimes you have to struggle with plastic or metal. I highly recommend the NWSL chopper for the thin wood stock but not on larger pieces the miter saw is overkill sometimes on thin strips of wood. The chopper has stops that you can adjust for different lenghts of wood but you have to be careful of the single edge razor blade as it will cut you and then laugh in a heartbeat! I have learned not to raise the handle up to far just enought to clear the stock. It is my favorite for cutting strips for individual boards like for a floor or siding.
I have the 83277, primarily because I needed to cut some 30 degree angles for a project. The provided saw does cut on the pull stroke. This means that the material being cut needs to be up against the vertical wall nearest you. That vertical wall is also the one that has the lip for securing the miter box against a table edge. Therefore, I found it counter-productive because the pull stroke required for cutting wants to pull the box away from the table edge.
I also found that those provided “cam-action clamp pins” did not work well in all cases, depending upon the width of the piece being cut.
One other thing that you might want to consider with any of these miter boxes is the height of the saw blade from the bottom of the teeth up to that strongback which stiffens the saw blade. I have a couple of saw blades that are relatively short in this direction and the strongback will hit the top of the miter guides before the blade cuts all the way through.
Thanks for the NWSL idea. I never considered that as an option. I checked out the NWSL but can’t find out how thick of material it will handle. The Chop-It at Micromark says it can handle material of only 3/32" . That would prevent it’s use on a lot of material I have in the Saw Mill kit. Will the NWSL accept thicker material?
Thanks to everyone for all the advice. I think I will select the 83277 because of the 5 cutting slots. I may also get the NWSL if it will accept wood thicker than 3/32"
I have the NWSL version of the chopper and 3/32 is pushing the upper limit of the blade. I don’t think there is much difference between the Micro Mark version and the NWSL version of the chopper . I think that the Micro Mark is just a copy of the NWSL tool and is made in China where the NWSL is I think still made in the USA… I personally preferr the NWSL version even tho it may cost more.
I used the chopper to assemble several Fine Scale Minature building kits and they require a lot of cutting of thin wood to the same length and it worked great.