Wood – How to remove the carbon brush holders from the HD 77 Skil saw

Try this little trick.

1. Cut two rectangles from your plywood an inch or two larger than what you want your finished pieces to be. Be sure one face of these rectangles are a straight factory edge.

2. Now stack the two pieces together and clamp them with the factory edges one on top of the other, nice and flush.

3. Scribe a perfectly square line using a builders square perpendicular to the factory edge on both sides separated by the dimension you want the piece to be.

4. Now take a perfectly straight piece of wood and clamp it onto the surface exactly at the dimension of the distance of the edge of your blade to the edge of the saw frame. You now have created a guide to run your saw against while making a cut through both pieces of plywood at the same time.

5. Repeat this procedure on the other side.

6. For the last cut parallel to the factory edge, measure precisely the distance and mark on either side, draw a line between the marks. This line should be square to the end cuts and parallel to the factory edge.

7. Now reattach the cutting guide at the blade to frame dimension as you did for the edges and cut both pieces at once again.

You have now made three cuts, two at a 90 degree to the factory edge and one parallel to the factory edge. Since both pieces were cut at the same time, they should be identical.

This can be done most easily with power tools as discussed in previous answers.

However, assuming that you can create a good guide using a metal straightedge clamped to the workpiece, and you can clamp the workpiece to a heavy table, and you have a long hand saw, you can do either of the following:

Saw/Drill Approach

1. Put your fence together to create a rigid straightedge aligned with one side of your groove. Now saw down 15 mm while pressing your saw up against your fence. Mark your saw at 15mm of depth so you can see how deep you've gone.
2. Move the fence to the other side of the groove, and repeat.
3. Mark a 3.5 mm drill bit at 15mm of depth. Mark the centerline of of your groove with a pencil.
4. Drill multiple vertical holes along your groove to a depth of 15 mm. This is much easier with a drill press; you will drill 40-50 holes per plank.
5. Using a small chisel, break out the remaining pieces, and try to make the bottom reasonably flat.

This will work, but is tedious, and requires your initial 2 cuts to be very accurate. Most people would simply find someone who had the correct tool, and who could do this in 2 minutes with it.