Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

bpete1969

11:46 AM (42 minutes ago)

On Friday, July 17, 2015 at 9:31:21 PM UTC-4, Ralph Cinque wrote: 

- show quoted text -

You really know nothing about sawing plywood.
1. no matter which length you're ripping, you can easily reach the saw.
2. They were covering an existing floor.Save the precision for furniture
making.
3. 19 year olds built this country from it's founding. Did your mom
make you use safety scissors until you were a 30 year old? 

Ralph Cinque:

Have you cut much plywood yourself, have you?  If you're ripping a sheet of plywood down the middle with a circular saw, think about what you need. You have to support the wood. And from the images we've seen, they weren't using the thickest plywood. They were using pretty thin flexible stuff. You'd have to have sawhorses on each side of the sheet you were ripping, but sparing the center where you were making your cut, and you'd have to space them pretty darn close together to keep the wood from bowing. You certainly wouldn't want that to happen, and remember, you are dragging this heavy saw across it, weighing it down. So, do you think they had all those sawhorses up there?

But, if you use an open table saw, you can just push the plywood through the blade, and the part that is being cut is always being supported by the table, though you still have to support the rest of it as well. So, it takes a table saw, and it also takes open space around it to work. 

Above, the company selling that table saw wanted to demonstrate that even one guy could handle the rip because of the efficiency of their machine, but typically two guys are involved.

So, the guy in the yellow shirt is pushing the wood through the blade, and the guy in the pink shirt is stabilizing, and that's the way it's done. What's the alternative? To reach across two feet of board and drag a circular saw down the whole length of it? You'd have to have the wood well supported on both sides throughout the cut, but leaving it open in the center where you were cutting. And remember, it would depend entirely on the operator to maintain his line. How straight is it going to be? And how well can he control it when he's two feet away and not looking down over the saw? You have to be above the saw to see what you're doing.

How can you do that if you're two feet away from it? There are sight lines on a circular saw that you have to stay visually glued to, lining up the one you are using with the line on your board, while you're operating it in order to guide it properly. He couldn't get over the saw from two feet away. 

There is no evidence that they had any such equipment up there on the 6th floor, and we have a lot of images of the 6th floor.