Make your own push sticks!

Since we have three SawStops in the shop, we go through a ton of pushsticks. For anyone who doesn't know what that is - it's a device that you use to push wood when making a cut that's too narrow for your hand to travel safely past the blade. The "width" of a safe cut is completely subjective - I make 3" or 4" cuts all the time without a push stick, but some people won't even make a 6" cut without one. It's all about practice, competency, and what your level of safety entails. 

Of course, I jumped down a rabbit hole when I was starting this post, curious to see some other designs for push sticks. And I found some ridiculous and/or cute ones, 

and then there are these dick sticks... boys will be boys. 

And these... 

For the life of me, I just don't "get" who would buy a push stick. It's a completely disposable item, designed to be cut into, and then thrown away, when it doesn't have enough meat on it (no pun intended) to safely hold your wood anymore. 

So - we make our own. And since there's always a ton of material around the shop, when we make them, we go big. 

It starts with a piece of plywood around the size of a sheet of paper.  These pieces happened to be about one square foot, but honestly anything will work. 

I like to use 1/2" material - anything thinner doesn't seem beefy enough, and thicker seems like overkill. A taper jig makes quick work of cutting them into a better shape - 

we cut one from one side, 

and then flip the piece over to one off of the other side. 

We could probably get a third stick out of that piece in the middle, but I didn't bother this time. 

So now we have a ton of these pieces, 

and when ganged together, it's easy to cut a notch in them.  

About a half inch is perfect, so I use a set-up block to adjust the blade to the correct height. 

A few cuts widens the notch, 

although I could put a dado blade in the saw and make one wide cut.

 Whatever... you can do it either way... but you need the notch about an inch wide. 

Please don't pull out a tape measure and measure an inch... if you don't know what an inch looks like, I don't know how to help you.

Having a bandsaw with a wide (resaw) blade makes this next step pretty easy. I added a "fence" to the tabletop, 

and set the distance at about the depth of that notch.

One quick cut gets rid of that piece that needs to be removed. 

Finally, just for comfort, I clip the corner of these blanks, so that it just feels better in the palm of your hand.

 I hit them on the belt sander, to round them out a bit, 

and then drill some holes so that we can hang them on the pegboard near each saw. 

Boom! We just made around 30 push sticks in about 10 minutes.

 Please - if you're a woodworker - don't buy these! 

Make your own!

I'm tempted to laser them with some cool design on them, or our logo.... but the truth is - there's never enough time to do fun stuff like that! 

These went into use the same day we made them!