Your going to lose a lot of material making binding and kerfing on a table saw, and making so many cuts will certainly create a lot of sawdust. Be careful to make good jigs to keep your fingers away from the blade while you try to stabalize those little bits of wood. Binding for instance(generally less than 1/8" thick) is going to want to just shatter when you run it through the blade. As far as dust I control it with my dust collector hooked to a table saw attachment(attaches underneath). It keep it down pretty well.
Good luck, and cut safe,
Rich
Yea, Blade guard is a must must, although a pain pain. I worked in a 'pro' shop for a while, he didnt have one (do any pro shops?). Got angry at girlfriend one day(girlfriend made him angry, take your choice) , lost tip of thumb.
Basily the leg brace forms 2 sections, upper and lower. Im enclosing the upper entirely. The bottome gets a ''collapsable' dust collection box that fits perfectly when opened, just have to deal with the corners so it collapses to get it out.
I was going to cut my bridge plates out of the maple slab I have, it has quarter-able wood in it, but I would have to angle cut it, and its 2X5X35, and its not worth it, tooo scary. Im probably a rosewood plate guy anyway. Oh well, maple bindings up the wazzooo.
I made a simple MUST HAVE feather board from Home Depo Paint stir sticks not Lowes, HD has real good square ones). I cut off 2" sections and glued them up in a perfectly spaced feather board, with about 10 long sections. Its a must have. I also did a "blade friction reducer" by mounting a strait piece of nice ply to the fence that ends at about the peak of the saw blade, so there is a gap when the board is cut through using a fence, so when the wood is cut, it doesnt go ' CHUNK'. It was messing up my mold cedar. I dug though and got some really nice quarter sawn cedar 2x4's at Lowes, for the mold etc. I cleaned them up, really nice stuff. Took 3 mos to dry out.