Stop Plywood Tear-Out: Score the Cut, or Tape It and Burnish Hard

The Problem

When you cut across the face grain of plywood, the blade lifts and splinters the veneer at the surface — tear-out. Every plywood project fights it, and the ragged edge it leaves can't be sanded away, because the damage goes below the surface.

The Technique

Here is an escalating ladder of fixes from a woodworking teacher:

1. Blade adjustments first. Raise the blade higher, switch to a sharper blade, or one with more teeth. Often that alone gets you an acceptable edge.
2. Scoring — the cleanest result. Knife-score the veneer along the cut line before sawing. The catch: you must score both sides of the kerf, and the blade has to track the score lines exactly. It works, but it's slow and unforgiving.
3. Masking tape — the fast middle ground. Tape over the cut line and saw through it; the tape holds the veneer down against the blade's lift. Reasonably clean, but not quite scoring-clean —
4. — unless you burnish the tape hard before cutting. Press the tape down with real force using a veneer roller, a burnisher, a rolling pin, even the rounded handle of a screwdriver. With the tape properly bonded, the taped cut comes out almost as clean as a scored one, at a fraction of the fuss.