A lot of you have been asking for
it. So here it is. My quick review
of the Woodpecker Exact-90 miter gauge.
The Wood Whisperer is sponsored by Titebond.
It's disclosure time. Whenever I do quick reviews
like this in the future, I'm going to
include a disclosure so that you can make
your own judgments about my potential motivations and
bias. I have an ongoing working relationship with
Woodpeckers and occasionally do ads for them on
products that I think are interesting. However,
this particular gauge was purchased with my own
money in order to minimize any monetary influence.
So let's get it on. So I find
the Exact-90 miter gauge to be a
very interesting product for two reasons. One it's
pretty expensive. $329 that puts it at the
top of the pile. If you go back
to my miter gauge review, you'll see that
most of them fit under that price and
those do more. That's the second part that
I find interesting is that this does one
thing and one thing only 90 degree cuts.
Now that may sound crazy. This may be
a head scratcher to some of you.
But if you are a person who has
been frustrated in the past by miter gauges
that lose their settings. It's set one day
but then you go to make another cut
and now suddenly it's not set something like
this might have some appeal for you.
So let's get down to it. Let's see
what this thing is all about. This is
not fully assembled yet. So let's get it
together and put it through its paces.
What is that? Maybe maybe I shouldn't have
thrown that one. The sacrificial fence, of course.
This is the extension.
I'll be honest. These spring loaded knobs are not really my
favorite style where you have to kind of
pull them back to get the range you
want. But the good thing is once you
have them pretty close, you just need to
loosen them a little bit move and then
tighten them again so they're fine just during
setup, initial setup. It's just not my favorite.
But I'm a picky guy. Loose, loose. Tight, tight.
Installing the sacrificial fence. Alright.
They say this is optional but you know,
I'm going to do it because I love
me some sacrificial fence. I'm not gonna tighten
these too much now. This is something you
want to really do at the table saw.
Something you didn't get to see there.
Batteries in my mic went out. So I
turned off the camera for a bit and
I started futzing with the micro adjustment here.
This knob is a little bit sticky when
when you first get it, I had to
mess with it for a little bit to
loosen it up and now it's just fine.
But initially I actually thought there might only
be like a 32nd of an inch range
here, which makes no sense. But I did
finally get it to move and it's not
so bad now. But my fingers, my fingers
paid the price because this knob does want
to hurt your fingers if it is sticky.
So if it's sticky, just use it a
little bit, it'll loosen up. Alright now this
do-jobbee I'm very interested in,
it's called the flop stop and the idea
is it's kind of a hold down that
is intended to support your work when you
have to pull the miter gauge really far
away from the table, which is a,
you know, sort of functionality that you don't
normally find on miter gauges. And I imagine
this is something you really only attach when
you actually need it. Now before we head
to the table saw and finish this calibration
and set up, I do want to let
you know that when I first received this,
the miter bar was a little bit out,
I put it into the table saw and
saw that it was kind of sticking above
the surface. It didn't look right. So I
put a straight edge on it and it
turns out that this miter bar is just
a little bit bowed. So of course I
contacted Woodpeckers and they immediately sent out a
replacement. The replacement is fine. Um It's nice
to read when you see notes like this
on the packing slip, it says must inspect
miter bar for trueness, so, and so
I'm not gonna say the person's name,
will give it the final inspection when ready,
please pack very well. That's just nice to
see. I've had replacement parts recently in a
miter gauge shootout that we did. The replacements were
never even checked before they were sent to
me. This one was and I kind of
love that. Now will you get the same
treatment from, from Woodpeckers? Is it just because
I do youtube videos? I don't think
so. I've talked to a lot of people
who have had customer service experiences with Woodpeckers
and it's always good news. It seems like
they really stand behind their products. They're not
going to give you a bunch of crap,
they're gonna fix it and get you back
to woodworking. Now if you saw my big
miter gauge review recently, you kind of have
an idea of the things I'm gonna do
here. We're going to get it calibrated set
up and just look at all the different
aspects of running this miter gauge. So in
the slot I can tell you already this
is the first one, even considering all those
other ones that I tested, this is the
first time the miter bar actually seems like
someone set it up for my saw.
I'm not really sure if that's really the
way it's intended to work or it just
happens to be the case. It's a little
tough to move. But I kind of like
that because that's zero slop. This thing is
not going anywhere. Of course. At this point
we're gonna want to move our fence out
of the way of the blade and I
can tell you one of the first things
I noticed here you might remember in the
other miter gauge review that there was at
least one fence that was not the tape
was engaged correctly to account for the fact
that your fence can't touch the blade.
Right. Well they have done a really good
job here of subtracting 1/8 of an inch
from the end of that rule and it
totally compensates for the gap that you're going
to have there. So that's always good. Right
now actually I'm gonna pull this out because
I want to see what this miter bar
is all about here. First thing I can
tell you this is the only one I've
ever seen on a miter bar that actually
has two washers. These are the washers that
prevent the bar from being pulled up. Normally
if you have one it's only at the
very tip. Having two of them I'm guessing
is going to help stabilize for when you're
using that flop stop whatever they call it.
If you need to pull the gauge really
far out. Having two of them is probably
going to make it more stable but we'll
find out. Now. I actually went to look
at the adjustment mechanism for tightening this guy
to the miter slot. Well, there is no
adjustment mechanism. This is really interesting. They have
these nylon springs along the bar that flex
out far enough that as I understand it,
it's going to give you registration and any
standard three quarter inch miter slot and there's
just enough range and enough spring to these
that it should do the trick and that's
why it fit perfectly when I put it
into my miter slot. So as you can
see, I didn't do a whole lot of
research ahead of time on this one kind
of learning about this as I go.
But I gotta say that is an impressive
concept for a miter bar and I think
anyone who makes a miter bar as long
as this holds up over time and it
doesn't loosen itself over time, it's going to
be the real test as long as that
doesn't happen. This is the miter bar to beat.
So the manual has a bunch
of instructions for how to calibrate the measuring
on this to make sure all the numbers
are correct. I don't need to worry about
that at this point, but the information is
there if you need it. You know,
I'm curious how far we can go with
this extension. So of course your capacity changes
depending on where your stop is. But I'm
getting about 48 inches on this and that's
almost the same as the longest one that
I know of on the market which is the
Incra 3000 SE which is at 49 inches.
That's really impressive. Alright, so now let's raise
the blade up. Check for square.
Man, that's close. I keep thinking I see a
little hairline gap down here but when I
put a little bit of pressure on it,
it kind of closes that up. I don't
even know that I would want to mess
with this because it's so darn close.
Let's assume it's not perfect. Let's pretend it's
off now. While this thing only does one
angle, thankfully, they did not assume it will
always come out of the factory perfect and
dead on calibrated because there is a way
to calibrate it. So you just take this
little allen wrench here and I see two
arrows telling me I can go one way
or the other. I'm assuming it's some kind
of a cam adjustment that will allow us
to make changes. I would also assume I
need to loosen the handle to do this.
Okay. Yeah, there's not. I mean the range
is pretty small there, but you shouldn't need
a lot right. This thing should be milled
close to 90. So I don't know if
you could see that, but it's just a
little bit of Motion there one way or
the other and then once we have the
setting we want lock this sucker down. Because
there's no need to change this angle and
that calibration adjustment is just sitting right there.
This isn't like most protractor style miter gauges,
You just tighten this guy down and you
keep it tightened down and it looks like
they even made it so that if you
want to you can get a wrench on
there and really secure it so that it
doesn't move on you. That's that's I think
essential with a setup like this. Well now
that I'm monkeyed with it, I've got to
actually try to get this thing squared up.
That looks good to me and since they
put that there, I'm going to assume they
want me to do this and I am
going to snug that bad boy up a
little bit. Not much. But yeah, now that
could make the difference between something that loses
its settings and something that doesn't and it
didn't move at all after I tightened it
down, still perfectly square. Alright, so now let's
just do a little bit of use and
abuse and then we'll be able to check
our settings again afterwards.
Alright, so after my use and abuse and a little cardio workout,
let's see how we did. Boom. It has
not moved. That's good and I can tell
you for sure at least with you know
the couple 100 passes in the miter slot,
this is just as snug as it was
when I first started. So now I'll tell
you the most pleasant surprise that I've had
with this unit is the cross cutting capacity.
I didn't really think that that's what they
were going for but it's pretty clear when
you look at a couple of things,
you could see they didn't just want to
make this like most miter gauges, they wanted
it to be able to almost act as
something of like a panel cutting sled that
you might make yourself in the shop.
Well even those, you're very limited to how
far back you can go. They've done a
couple of things here that allow you to
have greater capacity. That was a surprise.
So first thing is the length of the
miter bar itself. Now, if you recall from
my previous miter gauge review, we looked at
miter bar length and I mentioned that the
real thing you need to look at is
how far the miter bar extends from the
front of the fence. This is what allows
you to stay in the miter slot yet
pull the miter gauge back, that's one aspect
of it. But the second thing is on
the Woodpeckers, they added this flop stop,
so by putting a little bit of pressure
there when you come all the way out
this far, you need to make sure that
you're not tilted. That thing is what's preventing
you from doing that. So they're using the
size of the panel itself to your advantage
while the panel is bringing weight down,
you're actually using this as a stop,
which kind of lifts the fence up.
Really cool idea and it makes something that
normally would not be considered good for panels
turns it into something that actually might be
viable for panels and back to that miter
bar, take a look at this, This was
my favorite in the miter gauge review,
that's the Jessem. It's about double the
length on this miter bar extending from the
front of the Exact-90 and that's why
it's able to handle these panels so well.
Alright, there it is, that is an interesting
product. Before I get too much into my
final summary here, I do want to point
out a test that I did when looking
at the other miter gauges is how much
deflection is in the stop. This one's pretty
darn good little bit of slop there,
but not a whole lot to speak of,
certainly no more than the other gauges in
that other test, but overall this is uh
this is interesting, I expected this to be
a little bit more clear cut in terms
of my recommendation for whether people buy this
or not because it only does one angle.
I had so many people asking me why
is this not in the miter gauge review.
Well, because it would have failed when you're
comparing functionally something that does one angle against
a bunch of other ones that do countless
angles, it wouldn't have stacked up and the
price is too high, it just would not
have done well, but I think it sells
the product short, this is a product that
There are certain people who will look at
this because of frustrations they've had locking in
90° cuts, they will see what this thing
does and immediately jump on it. If you
think it's silly to just have a product
that only does one angle, what's one of
the first, maybe most popular builds that someone
does in their shop, a cross cut sled.
One of my most most viewed and earliest
videos is how to make a cross cut
sled and how many angles does it do?
One. But it does need to be recalibrated
periodically and that could be super frustrating.
So I can see why people would be
so frustrated that they would go, yeah,
you know what, I need something that's 90
degrees, stays at 90 always at 90 and
is never in question and never loosens up
in the miter slot. That's what this product
does. So overall it absolutely does what the
company promises, it does some things that I
wasn't even expecting because I didn't look at
their marketing literature prior to this, I was
very surprised at the crosscut capacity this brings,
that actually takes this from the world of
just a simple miter gauge that does one
angle, it also takes it into. Well,
now this is actually something for cutting panels
and I never cut large panels with a
standard miter gauge, any other miter gauge on
the market, you know, taken as is without
modification, will not allow you to cut panels
that wide. So this is not only doing
miter gauge jobs, but it's also doing panel
cutting jobs. Um, so that is quite impressive,
but the big question is, is it worth
it for that cost? I can't tell you
that. This is a really expensive product, but if
this ticks all those boxes for you and
you'd be like, yes, that is the thing
I've been looking for, well then you have
to decide if it's worth it for the
asking price, but there's no doubt that it's
well made, there's no doubt that it does
exactly what Woodpeckers says it will do and
keep in mind that this is a product
that's made in the United States, it's gonna
be a little bit more expensive to manufacture.
And ultimately, when it comes to, to Woodpecker
stuff, I know a lot of people don't
love how expensive it is, but my opinion
with Woodpeckers is that they are innovating and
making products that really are deep down into
this niche. They will look at the market
and see what are woodworkers frustrated by,
and then they try to solve that problem
with a product. I can't fault 'em for
that. And I love it because I often,
as a woodworker who kind of, you know,
straddles both professional woodworking and hobbyists, woodworking,
I see these problems too and I often
have my own frustrations and sometimes Woodpeckers will
knock it out of the park and other
times I'm like, not for me, but it
might be something that someone else will want,
you know, overall uh does what it says
it's supposed to do. Is it worth it?
That's up to you. But I think this
is a very interesting, compelling product and I
hope some of the things that are included
in here, other miter gauge companies think about,
because I would like on my Jessem
I would like to have a longer
miter bar. I want to uh slop flop
top. I also want something that helps prevent
panels from making this thing all floppy.
I want to be able to cut panels
with my miter gauge. It's just interesting stuff.
I'm glad I did this review. All right.
So I think that that's gonna do it.
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Thanks for watching.
They don't even charge you extra for that.