Arch taper advice with HF saw

[rosebowlpizza]

Hi Guys,

I have a question on the taper of the inner Arch bricks. To be clear I am speaking of the side taper(wedge) to form the arch, not the back taper that is used to join the dome to the arch.

I have the HF saw which can only cut~3.5", so I am struggling to figure out how to cut the taper on the full 4.5" side of the brick? I have seen that some actually cut the brick down to 3.5" in order to complete the taper in one pass. I have been trying to do it in two passes and have not had much success as of yet, and I don't want to keep experimenting and using up bricks. Also adding a wedge underneath the brick to get the angle lifts the brick and reduces the amount of cut the saw can make

Any advice/tips appreciated.

[Toomulla]

set the saw to cut one side as deep as you can then reverse and recut the balance

[JRPizza]

Here is a link to a post with a picture of the jig I made for cutting my arch bricks. It worked pretty well and might give you some ideas. I started cutting with the fat side up as shown in the picture. I just slid the jig left/right till the blade was just making contact with the top of the brick, then slid the stop (on the right) over to hold the jig in that position. I cut all the bricks by pressing them against the lip to the left, then rotated 180 and made the other down cut. After all the fat tops were cut, I re-set the jig so when I cut from the bottom (thin side) I was aligning with the cut I made from the fat side. You can slowly adjust the jig so the cuts work. When I found the right position I locked it down and cut the rest of the bricks. The only trick was finding bricks that were square, and not slightly a parallelogram. If the 2.5 inch sides were not 90 degrees to the 4.5 inch sides, it was very hard to get the cuts to line up. Hope this makes sense. I also attached an arch calculator in excel you can play with if you are having trouble with your dimensions.

[rosebowlpizza]

Thanks JR that does help. So you were able to complete a cut all the way across the top in one pass? The rubber guards on the back of the saw seem to keep me from doing so.

[JRPizza]

I think I loosened up the bolt holding the guard so it was more "floppy" and I was able to get the brick to pass. I set the height of the saw so the brick just cleared the washer on the bolt holding the blade. However you manage the tilt under the brick, if you have a way to index the edge of the brick in the same place every time, and make sure the bricks are square you can make repeatable cuts. On some of my cuts you could see a little blade mismatch along the cut face, but I was usually able to find an exposed face with little to no mismatch. Mortar does a good job covering anyway . I think you can see some of the slight mismatches in the attached pic.