Cutting plywood neatly

I am mostly working with wood at home and have very limited space and tools. Especially machine tools. During one of my projects I had to cut a 5mm plywood sheet with a Jigsaw. The problem here is that the Jigsaw blade moves up and down. Well, that is not the problem part though! Problem is when you are cutting in a direction that is across the top grain of the plywood. The blade. on its way out of the Plywood, that is also the cut-stroke of  a jigsaw, would shear the top layer and leave a very ugly and often hard to fix scar.

As you can see in the image below, left side of the cut is pretty much not usable for anything that will be presented on the front face of your workpiece.

Uneven cut on a cross grain of ply with a jigsaw

There is a remedy to this that I use for sensitive cuts. That is to scour the final side of my cut line with a craft knife a couple of times to make a small impression in the cross grain. Make sure that this cut rests only on one of the sides of the cut line, not in the middle of it.

Scour the cut line on final side that should be kept neatly finished

Now position the jigsaw blade so that the cut is made exactly along the line and scour that we made earlier is on the side of the cut that needs to be finalized and finished neatly. In the piece below, I had the right side on my project's top side that will be presented to the person using the finished product. Jigsaw was used to cut on the left of this scour line.

As you can see below, the right side is pretty neatly cut and clean without any scars from the jigsaw blade.

Clean cut line on finished side (right side)

Close up of the cut and scour-line. That small scour line made a world of difference to the cut's finish (right)

Another tip is to use the Jigsaw  (or circular saw) at  higher speed with slow feed. This combined with above trick is sure to give you perfect cuts in plywood! 


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