Cutting thin strips
I often have to cut long, thin strips of wood for things I make. This is a particularly difficult task with the MFT and saw. The Qwas dogs make it easy. Here's my technique:
First take a piece of stock the same thickness as the stock you'll be cutting. Here I'm using 3/4" mdf. Using the Qwas dogs to align the guide rail, it's trivial to make a rectangular piece with perfect right angles at all corners (see Qwas's videos). Here's the piece of mdf with a curved edge just before I ripped it. You can see that it's butted up against the 2 Qwas dogs that I used to align the guide rail. When I make the cut, I'll get a piece of mdf exactly the width of the guide rail (or at least the width of the back of the guide rail to the right side of my saw kerf, which is what I want).
Now I take my set-up blocks. I happen to have 2 sets. One (the closest set in the picture) is from Lee-Valley, and the other (brass) set is from Rockler. I took all the blocks that the two sets had in common, and placed them in a stack against each Qwas dog. I then pushed the mdf up against them, and made a cut.
You can see that I used a 1/2", a 1/4" and a 1/8" block. Now I can make strips the width of any combination of these blocks.
For instance, to make a 1/8" strip, I pull out the 1/8" block from each dog. I then push the mdf against it, and then snug the stock against the edge of the mdf. I put a dog at the farthest end of the stock so it won't move, and then use a Jorgensen clamp to hold it down during cutting.
And here's a 1/8" strip that I cut off. Pretty near perfect, by my calipers!
Here's a few more...
And here's a couple of 5/8" strips that I ripped, with the removed set-up blocks on top to show their accuracy.
Talk about a simple jig!
You don't need to use set-up blocks. If you know the width of the rip you want, just insert a piece of something that's the same width between the dog and a piece of mdf that slightly wider than the guide rail. Make your cut. Remove the spacer. Go ahead and make multiple, identical rips!