Hi, Randy,

To make the CUTS, you most assuredly would have the blade at one of those angles.

The funny 38-degree setting is for a trick that uses the tilted square blank as a spacer to set the fence.

Once you’ve got the fence in place, then before you make any cuts, you reset the blade to 30 degrees (measured from vertical).

I don’t know how radial-arm saws have their tilt scale arranged, but table saws customarily measure in degrees from vertical. ?This means they call a standard 90-degree cut a setting of zero. ?This caused a problem one time when I sent a shop a drawing for segments of a hexagon frame, and dimensioned the miter angle on my drawing by its actual physical shape of 60 degrees, and the shop guy used the number instead of using his head, ?and jumped through hoops because 60 was beyond the angle scale on his saw — he actually built a sled jig to hold my boards up on end so he could cut them as if he had set the saw?to 60 degrees. ?Never mind that the 30-degree chisel angle he sawed my boards to looked nothing like the drawing.

About safety, I think most rotary saws probably stop at 45 from square, because the farther you go from a square cut, the more you risk having the cutting force of the blade shove the work sideways on the table, and then things would get ugly for both safety and work quality.

(But the 38-degree angle was not about safety. ?All that stuff about kickback was a separate discussion.)

So what I’d guess would be best is to set your blade at only 30 degrees from vertical (no matter what the scale calls that), and cut 10:00 and 2:00,?

roll the stick a quarter turn to place 3:00 up, and cut 1:00 and 5:00,

roll again (6:00 up) and cut 4:00 and 8:00,?

roll again (9:00 up) and cut 7:00 and 11:00.

Since the original faces all survive at 3:00, 6:00, 9:00, and 12:00, you don’t have to reset the fence, you’ll still have one or another of those faces to run along the fence.

Only thing about the sequence I gave above is that to cut each of those pairs of faces (for example 10:00 and then 2:00), you have to turn your blank end-for-end, so it may be easier to?

cut 10:00, roll 90, cut 1:00, roll 90, cut 4:00, roll 90, cut 7:00 —?

then turn end-for-end just once, and do the same routine to cut 2:00, 11:00, 8:00, and 5:00.

I bet James is right that it’s a good idea to mark your four original faces before you start removing corners, so you don’t get lost.

best,?

Crispin